Network Performance Testing?

ItsMr.Data asks: "Recently, the department I work in has been planning on rolling out a new gigabit backbone network. We have been looking for ways to test network congestion. I am looking for a simple but accurate tool to test different paths through the network. I looked at Iperf, but I wonder what other test setups are out there, and if any are customizable to emulate differing types of traffic, such as streaming media, file sharing traffic, and video conferencing. So, what network performance testing setups do you use?"

Comments

MRTG

[Bios_Hakr]

It's been a long time since I sat in a network control slot, but I fell in love with MRTG.

First, make sure every device speaks SNMP.

Then, get MRTG up and running. By default, it'll discover devices and poll every interface every 5 minutes. If you want faster polling, you will need RRDTool. The intergration of both of these is well documented.

Next, configure some of the advanced options. Things like dropped packets, malformed packets, failed logins, mail spool sizes, temprature, CPU and Memory utilization can all be checked. The temp, CPU, and memory are great for showing if a router is too small for it's current tasking.

Finally, get one of the really cool web-based frontends for MRTG's data. Most of these show all the devices and allow you to click to drill down to specific interfaces on specific routers.

It took me about 3 months to get it all working right. Once it was in place, management was like 'ooh, graphs and charts'. Very nice stuff.

Re:MRTG

[Anonymous Coward]

have you tried Cacti? Sounds like it could of cut your 3 months to 3 weeks.

http://www.cacti.net

Forge

[njk]

Ben Greear, who is pretty active in the OS community (specifically networking) has a company at http://www.candelatech.com/. Two flavours of his product LANForge allow you to
1) Generate a variety of network traffic types VoIP, Ethernet, TCP/IP, HTTP, ...
2) Allows you to simulate different network environments (T1, FT1, OC2, GigE, DSL, DialUp)

One tool Cisco uses

[afidel]

is Chariot test suite from netiq. It works VERY well for simulating real world loads since it basically plays back captured streams of real traffic including combining multiple streams. It then measures the performance of link(s). Another tool they used was a hardware load simulator which I can't remember the name of at the moment. They were almost like a 4U modular switch with different modules you could insert for connecting to different media for testing.