Cisco® ISP Essentials

Appendix E. Traffic Engineering Tools

As a follow-up on how to track where your customers are going on the Internet, this appendix provides a list of publicly available tools that can be used to pull in statistics from your network. Most ISPs do not use things like HP OpenView, Sun NetManager, CiscoWorks, or Spectrum to manage their networks. These network management packages are great for the enterprise LANs, but they do not have the simple scaleable tools needed for ISP networks. Instead, ISPs pull together different, mostly public-domain, tools and use UNIX scripts to generate charts and reports (with GNUplot or RRDTool) for traffic engineering and quality of service (QoS) management.

Note that one Cisco-specific solution is to use NetFlow. ...