Bandwidth Utilisation Graphing

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Bandwidth Utilisation Graphing

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Bandwidth Utilisation Graphing
Bandwidth Utilisation Graphing
2016-08-11 17:23:19
Model :

Hardware Version :

Firmware Version :

ISP :

Hi gurus,

RE: TL-SG2008 (But applies to all Managed Switch Interfaces no doubt)

Can anyone tell me how one uses the Bandwidth Utilisation Graphs on the front page of the configuration U.I.? Mine stay resolutely at 0% no matter what I try and download
I have reported this to TP-Link support but, have not heard anything as yet. At first I thought this was a fault but, I'm not so sure an more? I'm suspecting that I actually have to set up some kind of throttling or control on the ports before this Graph will kick in to life? I've just, for the time being, switched the unit on and plugged in my Eternet cabling so, in effect, am using this as a dumb switch.

This screenshot was taken while streaming music from Spotify and browsing/interacting on Facebook etc. on the PC attached to Port 1. I refuse to believe that there is 0% utilisation during those activities :)
Any help appreciated.


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#1
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Re:Bandwidth Utilisation Graphing
2016-09-03 10:57:34
Maybe it is because the traffic on the port is very low. The ports of the TL-SG2008 are all Gigabit ones. You can try to monitor the status when you do the speedtest by using speedtest.net. If your problem still exists, please try to get help from the TP-LINK, I believe they will reply to you.
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#2
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Reply from TP-Link
2016-09-03 15:18:51

jery wrote

Maybe it is because the traffic on the port is very low. The ports of the TL-SG2008 are all Gigabit ones. You can try to monitor the status when you do the speedtest by using speedtest.net. If your problem still exists, please try to get help from the TP-LINK, I believe they will reply to you.


Hi Jery,
I am aware that these are Gigabit ports, however, this is only the maximum bandwidth possible and not an indication of how much data should be utilised before these graphs should populate? Even if it were, the Graphs are in percentage used and I am fairly sure that streaming music at the same time as browsing and doing speedtests (as you suggest) should show _some_ utilisation? In all the time I owned this switch I saw not one single twitch on these Graphs and, the main reason I purchased the unit was to try and get some way to monitor my data use sine we seem to be managing to go through 200Gb per month which is no mean feat!
I suspect that my QNAP NAS is transferring data constantly but it is very hard to detect using the unit alone, very poor reporting, so I thought this switch would be the answer but sadly not. I have returned it as TP-Link tell me it is not capable of what I required from it...! Here is the first response I got:

Dear James,
Thank you very much for your valued reply.

Sorry for the delay.
The actual rate divided by theoretical maximum rate is the bandwidth utilization. The following figure displays the bandwidth utilization monitored every four seconds. Monitoring the bandwidth utilization on each port facilitates you to monitor the network traffic and analyze the network abnormities. It catches data every four seconds.

You want to monitor the realtime bandwidth usage of every port, right?
I have consulted our senior engineer and I’m afraid that this switch doesn’t meet your needs.

If you need any further help, please feel free to let me know.
Best Regards!


When I questioned this and asked just exactly what those graphs were there to represent I then got this:

Dear James,
Thank you very much for your valued reply.

Sorry for the inconvenience caused.
Your purpose is to monitor how much data used of the ports.
However, this feature cannot monitor the actual traffic of each port.
It actually shows the bandwidth rate one port uses among all of the ports.
So it requires all the devices connected and working at the same time.
By the way, it captures the data very 5 seconds. It may capture the data after using for a while.

If you need any further help, please feel free to let me know.
Best Regards!


I didn't feel that helped very much more to be honest but, it was clear that they either didn't understand what I wanted ot I didn't understand what they were saying so, before my two week grace period ran out, I returned the unit and am now back on the hunt for some way to monitor my data use in the local network.

Am I to understand that your Data utilisation graphs actually show activity? Could it possibly have been a faulty unit? I strongly suspect that to have been the case but TP-Link were not helping.

James
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#3
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Re:Bandwidth Utilisation Graphing
2016-11-15 06:26:41
The graphs on TL-SG2008 show bandwidth utilization absolutely correct. You won't see much bandwidth utilization if surfing or streaming music, of course. You even won't see much bandwidth utilization if you would have a 1 Gbps connection to the Internet when streaming music, just b/c streaming music doesn't consume significant bandwidth (not to speak of browsing the web, which also requires very low bandwidth, despite the fact that WWW sometimes seems to stand for World Wide Waiting with some bloated websites nowadays).

If I watch a movie served from a NAS in my LAN, it even shows very low utilization of the switch (and I very much appreciate low utilization for streaming movies in a Gigabit network, otherwise there would be some serious fault in the network config ;) ).





If I copy the same movie instead of streaming it, bandwidth utilization increases, but still doesn't saturate the network (again, I really don't want it to saturate the network). For example, this is bandwidth utilization of the same movie as above, but now copied at once rather than being streamed in real-time:





If you do real performance tests - e.g. with iperf -, you will get graphs like this (where 620 Mbit/s was the practical limit for transferring data between the specific systems used for the tests, which were under load caused by other applications when testing):





So there is absolutely no reason to blame the switch if it shows you an actual bandwidth in the 0 to 1% range while streaming music or movies over the Internet. It is just so, b/c streaming doesn't need much bandwidth. If you want to measure relative bandwidth usage in respect to the most achieved in a certain time range, which then is considered 100% of utilization, you need another statistics utility such as RRD tools.

BTW: 200 GB per month is about 647 Kbit/s on average.
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#4
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