Internet Bandwidth Monitoring with PRTG

How much Internet Bandwidth do you you use on a given day? you Don't really know. If you would like to know all you have to do is to load PRTG on a machine and it can collect data for you and send you a daily report. All you would need to do is to setup SNMP on your firewall or router with a Public Name and Password don't be worried it only needs to be read only not write. This is so that the PRTG box can get the packet counts. The amount of traffic is very low in the a few Kb of traffic to collect this information. I am doing this for a couple of local schools and it has been very helpful in monitoring Internet usage. After it is setup it just sends an Email daily with the report. This tool has help me to plan for network internet growth and to identify a baseline and any issues that may arise can be detected quicker. With the Technology Readiness collection it would be helpful to have a tool as we are all going to have to report this information soon. With the Technology Readiness you will have to address the amount of bandwidth that you have available and how much you are using daily. If you collect it with a tool like PRTG you will have a better understanding how to answer this question. You can also download this tool for free and set it up on a computer at your district and collect the same data. The free version only allows for 10 devices to be monitor but that is plenty as you really only need one to find out your Internet usage.

Here is a list of three tools that you can use to do this.

http://www.paessler.com/prtg/download

http://www.cacti.net/

http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/index.en.html