Enterprise Network Traffic Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Using Web Technology

Today's enterprise networks are composed of multiple types of interconnected networks. Furthermore, organizations use a variety of systems and applications on these networks. Operations and management staff must provide an efficient, reliable and secure operating environment to support an organization's daily activities. Enterprise networks must be monitored for performance, configuration, security, accounting and fault management. Current management practices typically involve the use of complex, hard-to-learn and hard-to-use tools. What is needed desperately is a set of simple, uniform, ubiquitous tools for managing networks. Web-based management promises to provide such solutions. This paper focuses on the use of Web technology and the Multi-Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) for the purposes of enterprise network traffic monitoring and reporting. In this paper, we first examine the requirements for enterprise network traffic monitoring, analysis and reporting, and then present the design and implementation of a Web-based network traffic monitoring and reporting system that satisfies those requirements. We also present guidelines we have formulated and used for analyzing enterprise network traffic. We then discuss our experiences in using such a system for traffic monitoring on two large enterprise networks.