Establishing a baseline

[andyh]

Presently we do not have a baseline established for our network......does anyone know where there a site that gives you an easy step by step instruction on how to achieve this ?

thanks

 

[syndicate47]

A baseline is a picture of your netork under certain load levels. When I was doing this, I took different points in the day like morning logon, mid-morning, lunch and afternoon. Over 3 or 4 days this gave me a good idea of how my network behaved during a normal day. From this baseline I could monitor my network over time, to see if it was coping with the introduction of more users, servers, etc.

 

[andyh]

Thanks for the reply

Do you achieve this using performance monitor or network monitor ? we are a small but expanding firm with limited IT personnel resources I am anxious to establish this baseline but I am not sure which of the many options in these programs i should be logging, my intentions are to start the log and as i progress along my mcse hope to understand them at a later day ! where would be a good website that would point me in the right direction for creating a good log with relevant information?

thanks for your help

 

[syndicate47]

Unsure of a Website. I ran performace monitor and network monitor at the same time and when investigating high network traffic on performance monitor I pin-pointed the time and checked out the packets in network monitor. As far as options to monitor, I ran all the performace monitor 'network' counters but kept my eye on network utilization, bytes rec + send, etc. Remember you are only gather stats to and from the computer you are at, so if you have a few servers its a good idea to run the monitors on them all to get their different performances.

If you are doing a NT MCSE your course work will be a good source of information on counters to monitor.

Good luck with your MCSE it is worth it when you get it.