philipnet

And a sort of answer I hope!

First thing today, the network administrator asked me if I had been downloading anything. It seems that since midday yesterday through to midnight, our internet utilisation was at or near 100%! He then says to me that there's this Network Monitor program that comes with SMS, have you looked at it?

I was puzzled. I didn't know anything about this Network Monitor program, I hadn’t seen anything to do with this during the installation of SMS nor was then a mention of this in Start —> Programs —> SMS . Well it turns out that there's this NetMon folder on the SMS CD and inside the SP1 upgrade which houses the Network Monitor installer.

First it looks like a good idea to go into Tools —> Find Routers and let it take as long as it wants to find all the routers in an organisation - It found our three this way. Or you could start capturing data (try the Play button at the top ). Once stopped, you can look at the captured data and/or perform analysis on it. And then, and only then, can you easily get it to resolve host names and store the results.

Except that it was querying our DNS server which was replying with stale information. So I instigated scavenging of our DNS data, with a configuration that works well with our DHCP settings. However time will tell (i.e. next month!) just how well it all works.

Back to Net Mon, and with the captured data you can then run an Expert over the data to get it to report on (say) the “Top Users” to find out who's hogging all the bandwidth. The only problem with it is that it won't give you real time statistics which is what our network administrator is after. Oh well.