Example: monitoring router bandwidth

You can configure WhatsUp Gold to gather bandwidth usage on your SNMP enabled devices (routers, switches, etc.) and then track that usage through performance logs. For bandwidth monitoring, the Interface Utilization monitor is the most useful as it illustrates percent utilization and throughput.

The Interface Utilization monitor gathers statistics on the volume of bytes traveling to and from the active interfaces on a device. You can collect data on all interfaces, active interfaces, or specific interfaces. This monitor is configured and enabled through Device Properties > Performance Monitors.

Note: Before you can configure the monitor for a device, you must enable SNMP and assign the proper credentials via the Credentials Library. The Performance Monitoring system uses these credentials to connect to the device during the configuration process, and during normal performance gathering. For more information, see Enabling SNMP on Windows devices.

Configuring the monitor

The Interface Utilization Performance Monitor is one of the default performance monitors installed with WhatsUp Gold, and needs no global configuration to configure the monitor for a single device.

To configure the Bandwidth Monitor:

1. In either the Details or Map View, right-click on a device, then select Properties from the right-click menu.
2. Select Performance Monitors on the Device Properties dialog.
3. Select the Interface Utilization monitor from the list.
4. Click Configure to set up the monitor for the device. WhatsUp Gold scans the device and discovers the interfaces on the device.

   When the scan completes, the Configure Interface Data Collection dialog appears. If the credentials for the device are not configured properly, the scan fails (return to the Credentials Library to fix it). If the device is not SNMP-enabled, the scan fails.

5. Select the interfaces you want to collect data for. From the Collect data for list, select All, Active, Specific, or Custom active. If you select Specific, select just the interfaces you want to monitor in the list below. By default, active interfaces are measured.
6. On the Configure Interface Data Collection dialog, enter a time interval (in minutes) for how long you want the application to wait between polls in the Data collection interval box. The default is 10 minutes. See Program Options - Report Data for more information on data collection and roll-up.
7. Select Collect errors and discards data for selected interfaces to record this data.
8. Optionally, click Advanced to change the retry and timeout settings for the SNMP connection to the device. Click OK to save the changes to the Advanced Settings.
9. Click OK to save the Interface Utilization configuration.

Viewing data

WhatsUp Gold takes several polling cycles to produce meaningful graphs (with a 10 minute poll interval, this may mean a few hours). After enough data is gathered, several reports display this data.

• By Device. Click the Monitoring tab, click the Interface or Interface Errors & Discards monitor report, and then select a device.
• By Group. Click the Monitoring tab, click the Interface or Interface Errors & Discards monitor report, and then select a group.
• System Wide. Use the Top 10 Dashboard to view the top performers in terms of bandwidth utilization across your network.

See Also Custom Peformance Monitors Creating global custom performance monitors Creating device-specific custom performance monitors Example: troubleshooting a slow network connection