How to Check Bandwidth usage on router ?

Question

Hi, How can i check bandwidth utilisation on router without using any network monitoring tool.
Is there any router command to check this ? Plz help.
Thanks

Answer 1

It depends on what router you are talking about - I know Cisco, so will focus on that, though I know Juniper has similar capabilities. You can check the bandwidth going through at interface on a Cisco router by issuing the "show interface" command. This is most effective when you know the interface in particular that you want to check "show interface serial 0/0/0" for example.

When you type this command, you will get a screenful of information, you want to look for the "load" numbers (may just say "load" or "txload/rxload" depending on IOS Version). These are defaulted to a rolling average of 5 minutes and displayed as a factor of 255 (2^8, but counting from 0 not one). So a load of 255/255 would be completely saturated.

You can change this 5 minute default to a 30 second rolling average (that is as granular as you can get) by going to the interface in question and issuing the command "load-interval 30" ... I find this a very useful process when deploying a new WAN topology. The tx/rx of course is transmit load versus receive load, which can also be extremely handy in understanding certain traffic issues (BGP load sharing for example).

Hope this is of help to you.

Answer 2

Check Bandwidth Usage On Router

Answer 3

Routers are not designed to show this.

Some upscale higher end routers (e.g. Cisco, Adtran, and upper end 3 Com) with command line capability can show a lot of information by invoking the verbose command but this really does not do what you are asking. Most low end household grade routers do not have a command line capability however and I suspect you have a low end unit.

Answer 4

If he is on a seperate port you can set the port to a slower speed. If you both use the same port- you need to set the priority for your mac address to be a lower number (higher priority). I don't have a Linksys router in front of me to verify the commands, nor do you have listed the model you are using.