Posted by nathanbullock on Sat 5 Mar 2005 at 14:55
I currently have a Debian box working as a server/firewall/NAT router. Inside my local network I have a linux box and a dlink voip appliance. I monitor my webserver using a small program I wrote but I have no idea how to go about monitoring the network usage. I am trying to set up MRTG, although I haven't got it working yet. I am wondering if someone could give me a few ideas of how I could solve what I want to do, or even better, write up a complete article.
The things that I definately want to be able to do is monitor the bandwidth that the VoIP box is using, monitor the bandwidth that the linux desktop box is using, and monitor the bandwidth that the connection from the server to the internet is using.
Fancier things that I would like to be able to do is to break this usage up into the seperate ports (maybe using a pie chart). And I am not sure if there would be able to get any stats on the responsiveness of the VoIP box, not even sure if this comment makes sense. Basically the purpose would be to see if there is any need to set up QoS for the VoIP box.
And a final question. Does monitoring network usage significantly affect network responsiveness or throughput?
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