ET/BWMGR - Gathering and Graphing Traffic

Feedback is an extremely important component of managing your network, and the ET/BWMGR provides detailed traffic analysis in an extrement flexible manner. There are many add-on products on the market that allow you to gather and analyze your network traffic, but few can compete with the simple yet powerful features we provide. There is no additional software required (ie SNMP is not required) and configuration and enabling and disabling graphics is a simple function in the provided HTML interface.

The first thing to note is that all graphing is optional. One of the functions of the bwmgrd program is to gather usage information for configured interfaces. The default is to gather no data. And with no data, you cannot generate a graph. In order to have the bwmgrd gather statistics for graphing and reporting purposes you must specifically configure the interfaces and rules that you want to graph.

The ET/BWMGR allows you to graph interface traffic AND it also allows you to graph any rule or group of rules that you so chose. These extremely powerful features can be configured easily using the HTML interface.

When you first start the ET/BWMGR software or network appliance, you will see a table for Reporting Options:

The "Select Report" pulldown menu is empty, because by default statistics are disabled. In order to use the Graphs button, you must select a report. You may, however, configure physical interfaces by pressing the Configure button.

Default Settings

In the Defaults section in the ET/BWMGR main menu, the setting for Default Graph Directory should be set to the directory under your HTTP DocumentRoot where the graphs are to be stored. On appliances, this should be set to /graphs. So, for example, if your DocumentRoot is /usr/local/www/htdocs and the graph directory is set to /graphs, the graphs will be stored in /usr/local/www/htdocs/graphs, and referenced by /graphs/graphname in the generated HTML code.

Configuring Interfaces for Traffic Analysis

When you press the Configure button (with the Select Report field empty), you'll get a screen that allows you to configure "non-rules". With this screen, you can set up graphing for interfaces defined in your system and also external devices (via SNMP).

The pulldown menu labeled "Local Interface" will have the interfaces in your system that you can define stats gathering and graphing for. This is typically limited to ethernet interfaces and WAN interface if you have an ET WAN card. Select the interface you want to enable graphing for, and press Create/Edit:

As you will notice, there are not many options. In fact, you could simply click on the "Save" button and you would be ready to go. The default colors (the same as used in the popular MRTG program) are proven to be visually acceptable, and if you do not enter a Title the graphing software will automatically generate a title based on the interface name. If a company name or specific service is associated with the interface or rule, you can enter something descriptive in the fields before clicking "Save". You can easily change these choices later, so you don't have to make a major decision initially.

When you are done configuring your graph, press "Save", which will bring you back to the main menu. You should now see any interfaces that you just configured in the pulldown menu. Of course there won't be much of a graph for awhile, because we just started gathering data. If you select the report you just configured, and press the Graph button, you should see an empty graph.

Bandwidth Reports

Bandwidth report are an external php module named by default bwmgr_reports.php. If you have an appliance there is a Reports tab on the left hand size of your screen with a selection for "Bandwidth Reports". If you have the software version of the product, You should have installed the module at a web accessible address. Upon initial access, You should see the following menu:

This menu allows you to select and configure whatever report you choose to run.

REPORTS:

Monthly Reports:

To get a monthly bandwidh report for the current month, just press the Print Report button. If you want a report for a different month, enter the month, and the year if its not the current year. A report similar to the following will be shown:

By default, the report is sorted by name. By selecting the Sort/Incoming radio button in the main menu, you could easily display the report as follows:

Note the Menu link on the top of the report. This can be used to go back to the default "/bwmgr_reports.php" page in lieu of the Back button, which may also be used in most cases.

Recent Usage Report:

A "recent usage" report show usage for the last 5 minutes in bits per second and (by default) sorts them by name. The most useful report is to sort whatever traffic you are looking at from high to low. To select the Recent Usage Report

To use the defaults, which is to sort by combined usage high to low, just hit the Print Report button.

To get a report for the last 10, 30 or 60 minutes, use the pulldown menu and hit Refresh.

Daily Bandwidth Report

Daily bandwidth reports show the daily usage for a particular entry for a given month, and also shows the 95th percentile for the usage over the month. To select a daily report, you' need to select a specific entry from the Name: field:

For the current month, just select the Daily Usage report and the Name for the report, and press the Print Report button. A report like the following will be shown:

The report shows usage by day of the month, and also shows a 95th percentile value for the month at the end of the report. There is also a pulldown with a button to get quick reports for other customers without having to go back to the main menu.

Graphing External Devices

You can also configure the system to gather statistics from external devices via SNMP. To select an external device, enter the IP address of the remote machine in the "Remote Device:" field and press the Query button. The system will attempt to retrieve an interface list from the remote device. If successful, its likely that you will also have no trouble gathering statisitics. However if this fails, you likely either cannot access the device, the device does not have SNMP running or the device does not is not using the standard "Public" mib. SNMP communities other than Public are not likely to work.

If the device list can be retrieved, you should see a screen similar to the following:

Simply select the device you want to gather statistics for, and press the "Create/Edit" button. You should then see a configuration screen, the same as you would for a local device.

Allowing Your Customers to View their Reports

The Graph Access field allows you to allow public access to graphs and bandwidth reports. By setting this to Public you can give your customers a URL or a simple form on your server, protected by a password from the Password field:

Note that the above sets the Graph Directory is blank. This will place the graph for the generated page in the default graph directory. You could alternatively specify a directory here, which would place the graph in the directory specified under the http root. In other works, the setting in this file REPLACES the Default Graph Directory setting (it does not go under the default). So if your DocumentRoot is /usr/local/www/htdocs and you put a setting of /AcmeCorp here, the graph would be placed in /usr/local/www/htdocs/AcmeCorp.

In order for graphs to be accessible, Graph Access must be set to "Public", and you may optionally set a password. If the graph access is public and general GUI access is not established, the cgi code will look for a password matching the setting you set here. To set up remove viewing

Field	Description
statsifac	The "name" of the rule
graph_day	The date in MM/DD/YY format
grphpwd	The password for the rule/graph

You'll then need to create a submit button named either "daygraph", "2daygraph", "weekgraph" or "monthgraph" for the corresponding page that you want the customer to view. There is a sample html page in your distribution called /usr/hdlc/bwmgrgui/custgrph.htm which can be used as a sample for providing customer access.

You can alternatively not specify a password and password protect the directory that the graph is in if you prefer .htaccess for example. Typically this requires a lot more work than our method.

Configuring a Rule to Graph a Specific IP Address

One of the pitfalls of SNMP is that it is limited to gathering info from interfaces, which may not be what you want. While interface traffic analysis is interesting and useful, you typically have many hosts and many services on a network and you need to see a breakdown of the individual hosts. ET/BWMGR integrated graphics make this simple.

To gather statistics for a specific IP, create a stats-only rule from the Bandwith Rules screen, enter an IP address and enable stats:

When you are done, press the "Add Rule" button the system will create a "stats-only" rule and will also create a default (empty) configuration for the rule, which will tell bwmgrd to store this rule's usage in the database. If you want to customize the stats config (ie enable user graph access or change the Title), you can go to the main menu and you should see "AcmeCorp" listed in the "Select Report" pulldown menu.

If you are using an external gathering system (such as MRTG), you can optionally specify an SNMP interface. This will create a pseudo interface in the system that will be accessible from external SNMP devices (assuming you have snmpd running of course. Interfaces must be named in the format A# where A is an alphanumeric string no more than 7 characters and # is a digit. An example for the above might be "Acme0" (AcmeCorp0 is too long). Note that the Enable Gathering function and the SNMP Interface can be used together or separately. If no stats interface is specified then statistics will be kept internally only; if only a stats interface is specified then only a stats interface will be kept, but not gathered by bwmgr (and thus no graphs will be accessible locally).

Note that ANY rule can have stats gathering enabled. So if you have a bandwidth limiting rule for an IP you don't need to create a stats-only rule, as long as the rule matches everything for the IP. You can graph protocols, groups or any other class of rule that you can create. If the rule gets hits, the data can be gathered and graphed.

Notes on Using SNMP with the ET/BWMGR

When you create an SNMP Interface with the bandwidth manager software the interface is created immediately, and usage stats will begin to be recorded. However, the SNMP agent on your system will not report the new interface unless you restart it, because SNMP agents typically don't account for dynamic interfaces that are created after system startup. This implies that you will have to kill and re-run snmpd (HUP-ing it won't work) to get your SNMP agent to report the new interfaces. Additionally, if you are running standard MRTG or some other client that (annoyingly) uses interface numbers rather than names, you should reboot your system and the client with the new interface number as the relative interface numbers may change.

Viewing Graphs