how do you monitor each virtual machine's traffic on your server?

[SilverNodashi]

Hi all

 

I'm interested in knowing how you monitor the traffic of each individual VPS on your dedicated servers?

[TDub]

That's a pretty broad question. What exactly do you mean by traffic? Network traffic (bandwidth), web site traffic (i.e. stats, current site load, etc), SNMP traffic (memory, CPU, etc)?

[SilverNodashi]

well, the traffic to & from the VPS, i.e. bandwidth.

[TDub]

You could run something like PRTG (http://www.paessler.com/prtg) against the virtual NICs to see how much NIC traffic is going back and forth. PRTG graphs it all out and makes it really easy to see trends of not only bandwidth but memory, CPU, disk, etc. Been using it for quite a while on my dedicateds and virtuals and it works quite well.

[SilverNodashi]

Thanx, I've decided to use Cacti instead

[TDub]

Cacti is good for a free product. I used it for quite some time but I found setting up monitors (i.e. finding MIBs) for some things to be rather tedious. That's why I went with PRTG. Even though PRTG costs, it was much easier to work with in the long run.

[SilverNodashi]

does free make it bad? No offensse, but a hefty price tag (or even a price to begin with) doesn't make a product better than a free counter part. Cacti has been doing a very good job of graphing our network switches & firewalls, and it's also doing a great job in graphing the VPS's now