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My client machine/(s) is/(are) Windows XP SP2. I can’t effort every time to have physical access to my server machine. To analyze the real time traffic and bandwidth between client and server machine, which tool would be best?

ravi
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  • Depending on what you mean by 'analyze', a packet sniffer such as Wireshark may be what you need. – Aaron Miller Oct 05 '12 at 20:42
  • @AaronMiller: I just wanted to know the traffic and bandwidth consumed details with graph representation.... – ravi Oct 05 '12 at 20:47

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XP's built-in performance monitor (Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Performance; Start, Run "perfmon") will be your friend here, once you've done some configuring on it. To wit:

  • Remove all of the default counters by clicking them in the list at the bottom of the window, then pressing the Del key or clicking the 'X' button in the toolbar.

  • Add counters, by right-clicking the graph and choosing 'Add Counters' or clicking the '+' button in the toolbar, for Bytes Sent/sec and Bytes Received/sec for the network interface(s) you're interested in monitoring. (To monitor traffic on all interfaces in a single counter, choose the "All Instances" option on the right-hand side of the "Add Counters" dialog. To monitor traffic on a computer other than the local machine, choose "Select counters from computer" and enter the target machine's UNC path (\machinename) in the dropdown box.)

  • Adjust the scales for the graph and the counters until the graph gives you sensible output. (For a 10Mbps network, setting the graph scale to 10000000 and the counter scales to 1.0 will give you an "actual size" representation of the data, but that may not be of use to you; if there's not much traffic passing, the counters will stay pinned to the bottom of the graph, but if you adjust the scale downward, then high traffic will clip at the top edge. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any "autoranging" capability; adjust to taste.)

  • Once you've got the graph and counters set up to your satisfaction, use Save As on the File menu to save an .msc file containing your customizations. Henceforward, you can simply execute that saved .msc file to bring up the graph.

Sadly, I don't see any way to show cumulative data on this graph; it doesn't offer any summation capabilities that I can find. That said, this should quickly give you a fair approximation of what you're looking for, and from the sound of it, you may also find useful the ability to monitor multiple hosts on a single graph. Hope this helps!

Aaron Miller
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There are a few 3rd party tools that will give you an overall bandwidth usage view with graphs etc. For example:

NetMeter: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Network-Tools/Bandwidth-Tools/NetMeter.shtml - gives sums / lightweight / free / standalone

DU Meter: http://www.hageltech.com/dumeter/about - Also gives you Sums/Alerts etc.

floyd
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