We need to monitor is bandwidth consumption by T1 routers on our network ... ?
Q: One of the main things we need to monitor is bandwidth consumption by T1 routers on our network. I am fairly familiar by now with monitoring the individual MIB's that present themselves but just wanted to see if there's something I'm missing as I'm not finding an easy option to just monitor bandwidth consumption for an individual router?
A: You may use the SNMP Custom to monitor the bandwidth individually for each of the interfaces on router.
Say, on the attached screenshot you may see more or less typical picture you would get if open the IPHost's SNMP browser against the router. There are 3 network interfaces - LOOPBACK, LAN and WAN on router. The "ifInOctets" and "ifOutOctets" variables are the counters for incoming and outcoming traffic goes through the corresponding interface.
These counters return total number of bytes sent by the network interface while it is important to monitor number of bytes sent per second. To automate this task, the Counter Type property of SNMP Custom monitor can be used. Its "Current Value" setting indicates that actual counter value should be regarded as performance while its "Delta" setting instructs the monitoring service to calculate deltas of each two subsequent performance values divided by number of seconds between polls. Note that Delta counters do not show any value until the second poll.
So, if you need to monitor both incoming and outcoming traffic goes through some interface you need to create two monitors, use "ifInOctets" variable for one and "ifOutOctets" for another, and change the "Counter Type" property of monitors to "Delta". You may also use the "Divide returned value by" property to normalize the performance values (say use 1024 get it in Kbytes/sec instead of bytes/sec).
See more details on SNMP monitors and SNMP Browser at:
Help: SNMP
Help: SNMP Trap
Help: SNMP browser
