[ale] Etherreal and switches

[Jim Popovitch]

On Thu, 2006-09-28 at 11:59 -0400, Christopher Fowler wrote:
> My confusion is that I can purchase software that claims to sit on your
> network and alert when bandwidth utilization is too high.  I think this
> works great if you have hubs.  What I fail to see is how well this will
> work when you are using high quality Cisco switches.  Also how can a
> product like this really know what my bandwidth usage is if I have a
> 6500 series with a massive backplane.  A backplane much larger than the
> gb ports.  Also for a product like this to work it must be able to see
> _all_ the traffic.
> 
> Here is a description from one such product:
> 
> Toolbox continuously monitors the QoS and provides a complete audit
> trail of your network traffic utilizing our award-winning XXXX feature.
> XXXX provides you the ability rewind and replay your network to view the
> applications, their bandwidth and source IP that were traversing the
> network at the time of voice degradation or failure.  With our Remote
> Scope feature, you can monitor the flow of LAN traffic and drill down by
> source, destination, application and port
> 
> I'm trying to access how well that will product will work with many
> different sizes.

My experience is that most network management toolkits like to think
that all your traffic runs through a common core that they will have
access to.

-Jim P.