Ways to monitor Internet usages from workstations?

[googlevich]

Hi

I have the zabbix agent setup on the windows server/domain controller which is acting as a file server, app server, dns server, mail server etc...

I want to know if there is a way to simply monitor the internet usage of each workstation (connected to the server) without installing the agent onto all the workstations.

Thanks.

[troffasky]

The short answer is 'no'.

The long answer is, if you can make that data available to the Zabbix agent on the server you are monitoring, then 'yes', but that would probably be more work than installing the agent on each machine you want to monitor.

And another thing, installing the agent won't necessarily tell you the internet usage; it will tell you the network usage, which will include local network traffic [eg accessing file shares] as well as internet usage.

If you're still interested in interface data from each machine but don't want the agent, you could use SNMP to poll data from a managed switch. You would have to identify the port on the switch that each workstation is plugged into.

If you're only interested in internet data, then it's something that would need to be done on [or with cooperation from] the gateway; ntop is good for this if your gateway is unix-ish, failing that you can send data to ntop with Netflow if your gateway supports it.

Another possibility is Squid as an HTTP proxy.