Measures reported by TopSitesTest

Studying network traffic to popular / frequently accessed web sites and measuring the bandwidth usage of this traffic is key to fine-tuning firewall policies in an enterprise and understanding the real bandwidth requirement. The TopSitesTest test simplifies this! For each web site that is configured for monitoring, this test reports the amount of data transmitted and received and the bandwidth utilized by that site. Web sites that consistently invite heavy traffic and consume excessive bandwidth can be identified in the process. If such sites are mission-critical business sites/applications, then this information will help you to determine the bandwidth required to ensure the peak performance of the sites and thus enable you to right-size your network. If such sites are inconsequential to your business, then this information will point you to where bandwidth is spent unnecessarily; this in turn will prompt you to initiate measures to control/regulate accesses to such sites.

To configure the web sites that this test should monitor, do the following:

1. Edit the eg_netflow.ini file in the <EG_AGENT_INSTALL_DIR>\agent\config folder (on Windows; on Unix installations of the eG agent, you will find this file in the /opt/egurkha/agent/config folder).

2. In the TOP SITES section of the file, create a sub-section for the managed NetFlow device. The IP address of the target NetFlow device should be the title of that sub-section. The sub-section title should be specified in square brackets. For instance, if you have managed the NetFlow device using the IP address 192.168.10.25 in your IT infrastructure, then, the specification in the eg_netflow.ini file will be:

   =================================
   TOP SITES
   =================================
   [192.168.10.25]

3. In this sub-section, specify the URL of the web sites to be monitored, one after another. Against each site URL, specify a comma-separated list of IP addresses of that web site. For example, if the web site www.xyz.com is associated with the IP addresses, 192.168.10.30, 192.168.10.35, 192.168.10.40, 192.168.10.90, then your specification will be as follows:

   =================================
   TOP SITES
   =================================
   [192.168.10.25]
   www.xyz.com=192.168.10.30,192.168.10.35,192.168.10.40,192.168.10.90

   Where a site is associated with a specific range of IP addresses, you can even specify the IP range against the site URL, as shown below:

   =================================
   TOP SITES
   =================================
   [192.168.10.25]
   www.xyz.com=192.168.10.25-192.168.10.45
   

4. Likewise, for a NetFlow device, you can configure multiple site URL specifications. For example:

   =================================
   TOP SITES
   =================================
   [192.168.10.25]
   www.xyz.com=192.168.10.25-192.168.10.45
   www.abc.com=192.168.10.125,192.168.10.121,192.168.10.130,192.168.10.90

5. If a single eG agent is monitoring multiple NetFlow devices, then in the eg_netflow.ini file of that eG agent, you can create multiple sub-sections - one each for every NetFlow device - and configure web sites to be monitored for each device. For example:

   =================================
   TOP SITES
   =================================
   [192.168.10.25]
   www.xyz.com=192.168.10.25-192.168.10.45
   www.abc.com=192.168.10.125,192.168.10.121,192.168.10.130,192.168.10.90
   [192.168.10.200]
   www.eazycart.com=192.168.10.1,192.168.10.2
   www.fb.com=192.168.10.5,192.168.10.9

6. Finally, save the file.

Outputs of the test : One set of results for every site URL that is configured for monitoring in the eg_netflow.ini file.

The measures made by this test are as follows: