[CentOS] monitor invidiual client (PC) network traffic to server?

Tue Jan 6 17:00:01 UTC 2009
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

John R Pierce wrote:
> mcclnx mcc wrote:
>> We have DELL servers with CENTOS 3 and 4 installed. Application is client/server type.  
>>
>> Does there has way monitor invidual client (PC) network traffic to server?
>>   
> 
> 
> nmon can do this, but its fairly involved to setup, and the collection
> daemon can use quite a lot of CPU (to do this, you need to sniff all
> traffic, categorize the packets by whatever criteria you're interested
> in monitoring, and count them)

Wireshark can do a one-off run with various forms of analysis and 
filtering - ntop (http://www.ntop.org)is geared towards longer-term 
summaries.  Either must run on the server itself or on a machine 
connected to a bridged switch port so it has access to all the packets. 
  They have the advantage of being able to do port/protocol analysis though.

Another approach is to run snmp on the clients and use some snmp 
monitoring tool to collect the interface statistics.  Cacti is probably 
the easiest to set up - opennms (http://www.opennms.org) is more 
comprehensive.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com