Question : Solarwinds 2002 Engineers Edition

We have been experiencing erratic performance issues relating to our VSAT which is our primary connection to the internet, and I am looking for network monitoring tools to help me track down the problem.

I've installed Solarwinds (nice product) and I am trying to find an easy way to monitor the top talkers on my network. It appears that the only way to do this is to add all the interfaces into the Network Performance Monitor and pull the stats from there, but this isn't a very friendly way of doing things. I know this is more of a case of RTFM than an actual problem but if anyone has any suggestions I would appreciate it.

Cheers.

Answer : Solarwinds 2002 Engineers Edition

The way you're thinking about is the right way to go about it using this product.  However, it isn't really going to tell you who your top talkers are - it's only going to show you port utilization.  It doesn't give information about who it is or what kind of traffic it is.

To get that information you would need an RMON probe or some kind of sniffer.  Fluke makes a product called Optiview which will plug in and listen and build tables of devices, protocols in use, top talkers, look for obvious errors (like duplicate IP's) etc.  However, it's fairly expensive - about $30K.  You can rent them, however.  Or you could throw a sniffer or two in your network which would be able to do the same thing.

Hope this helps.