When I work with smaller sized customers, I often hear that they don’t have any networking monitoring software available.  Usually there is some server monitoring there, and something that pings network devices, but nothing that can display how much bandwidth is being used, and when.

If you are in this situation, I implore you to check out PRTG monitor from Paessler.   This is a great piece of software, that can do much more than monitor your Internet bandwidth, but that’s what I use it the most for.  There is a full version, but the free version will allow you to monitor up to 10 ports which is plenty if you’re just monitoring your WAN, or a few ports like your ESXi hosts in your home lab!

I’m monitoring my Cisco ASA with this software and can watch my Ethernet0/1 interface to determine how much ingressegress traffic is happening at any given time.  You can look back over 365 days to see how traffic has changed as well if you’d like.  Mostly, I use it to see live data though.

The setup is very easy, and can even scan your network to find your devices if you’d like.  Enter your Windows credentials, SNMP Credentials, and VMware credentials and let the wizards do their magic.  You can also have it monitor websites, cloud services such as Office365 or you name it.

Here is some SNMP info it looks for.  This is what’s monitoring my ASA bandwidth.

Summary

Just because you’ve got a limited budget doesn’t mean you can’t get some basic but highly valuable information from your network.  Check out this tool that I’ve used for many years if you’re trying to get some insight on some of your interfaces.