I have a client who wants to find out which devices on the network are the network traffic hogs. Does this software have feature that shows the network devices and the traffic each device is using in real-time over over a time period. I don't need a very complicated software but just features to display network devices and bandwidth usage for device. asked 20 Feb '13, 16:06  zoinkman |
One Answer:
Wireshark is a primarily a network troubleshooting and packet capture tool. You can use it to analyze bandwidth usage (through the statistics functions), however it is not ideal to monitor a whole network for a longer period of time (hours, days), as you would have to record a lot of data (GByte or Tbyte). If the network is really small and you are primarily interested in the traffic hogs regarding internet usage, then you may be able to use Wireshark for that, by capturing the whole traffic at the router interface for a limited time period (see http://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/Ethernet). If you need to look at the whole intranet traffic of all systems, for a longer period (hours, days), then Wireshark is probably the wrong tool for you. I recommend to look at Netflow and equivalents (listed in the Wikipedia article). Analyzing the traffic counters of your switch ports may also help (see Cacti, Zenoss, Zabbix, or similar). Regards answered 20 Feb '13, 16:37  Kurt Knochner ♦ edited 20 Feb '13, 16:59 |
