Slow internet bandwidth on Network

bandwidthinternetmonitoringnetworking

I know this looks like some of the other questions but they don't seem to have been answered as fully as I hoped.

On our network we have a bunch of PC's that are connected to the internet. Now for the past few weeks it seems that our downloading bandwidth is being used up. Now we have a very basic tool to monitor inbound and outbound traffic, so that's how I know it is inbound(download) traffic. Now I need to work out what machine(s) is causing this, so far the network monitoring tools either monitor internal network traffic which is crazy anyway and looks like the 'matrix' or it works out total bandwidth used, which is what we have anyway.

I need a tool that can tell me which machine on our network is using the most internet traffic (inbound and outbound) and if not why not?

We have a Windows network. We have unmanaged switches.

Best Answer

To analyze which device is generating/receiving the most traffic you are going to need network equipment that can collect these statistics.

As mentioned in a previous answer the easiest way to do this is with a managed switch which will allow you to poll the traffic on each port.

Another method is a router that can either collect traffic accounting data on a per MAC address level or export network traffic in "NetFlow" format which can be analyzed by a tool such as NFSen

The final method is going to be installing some sort of packet sniffer (e.g. a PC running Wireshark). In order to get this to work on an unmanaged switch you will need to either install the sniffing PC in-line to the traffic (i.e. two network cards configured for L2 forwarding) or install some form of Ethernet tap between the switch and router.

The less managed network hardware you have in the network the more networking knowledge you will need to collect the statistics.

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