Real Bandwidth usage - Control Center which one is correct?

HI Luk,

like you those graphs always puzzled me, the one on rule count shows 15 to 20mb/s download, I only have a 4.5mb/s link.

If you want some extra strange graphs click on the little icon in the WAN link management next to each WAN connection. Now one of my links has IPv4 and IPv6 and funnily the graph shows the same amount of data on both.

Ian

Thanks Ian.

It seems that Sophos does not care it.

Explaining to customers which graphs to look at is difficult!

An official KB should be published!

Hi Luk,

thinking about the graph with the firewall rules active etc, I suspect could only be used to indicate there is traffic on the networks. If there is a lot of traffic the graph grows and I wonder if the volume shown is in reality the traffic the XG is sending  to the monitoring PC to update the various tables?

Ian

I liked the control center design compared to UTM when it was first introduced in XG15 but they haven't improved it since then and there is no real data in those graphs. Just a selling tool to overwhelm a new user with the wow factor of "LOOK" at all that info right at your fingertips.

Looking at live traffic is worthless. I glance at the control center once in a while to see the web/application categories breakdown and if there are any blocked apps that I need to be concerned with.

The actual bandwidth (circled in red below) is the 30 second snapshot of your current bandwidth being used. It always looks low to me but probably to control large spikes in graphs, they are trimming small spikes so its probably not too accurate.

The Active firewall rules graph shows the total bandwidth used by the rules in 30 seconds and is worthless also unless you have some kind of data cap and are concerned about a single firewall rule using too much data.

Web activity which takes most of the screen is totally worthless and I haven't found why its even there.

Hi Luk,

I only rely on the graphs shown in Diagnostics -> System Graphs, they are pretty accurate.

Also, I feel that the bandwidth graphs in the CC are in BYTES when we are used to mesure bandwidth in BITS. So, when you should see 100 Mb, you will see only 12 MB (with uppercase B).

Example :

81Mbps at 17:01

10.03 MBps at 17:01, which is consistent

Regarding the "Active Firewall Rules" graph, I really don't understand it.

I would love to have more accurate representation of current/past bandwidth.  All the reports collapse and average which is not useful.

Other firewalls provide much more detailed information.

Another twist in these strange screen displays. Recently I had IPv6 enabled with 3 rules, two carried traffic. I started to see blue and green values in the graph, quite large values, considering the bandwidth I have access to.

Billybob commented about the graph showing the total traffic used by rules, well yesterday I was running large transfers of data through the wifi to the lan and nothing showed.

Ian

No one from Sophos had a look at this thread and added a comment.

Unbeliavable! Control Center and Live Connections are just useless.

Hi,

you ned to be careful how you interpret some of those graphs. I have two external gateways and the graphs appear to have them reversed. One has a 1gb interface and shows 4.5mb/s where as the other has a 100mb interface and shows 1gb/s.

Also the memory graphs labels need to be changed, the total needs to say total configured, because in two out of the three columns it is not the total of the two lines above.

Ian

Hi All,

After years of XG usage, I still cannot understand in the CC which graph is the correct one. I only have one user role and look at the graphs that CC reports:

Looking at the command line output:

system diagnostics utilities bandwidth-monitor

it reports like "bandwidth graph". I have a 100Mb at home and I never reach more than 8 Mb behind XG. Yes I know about IPS, Web Proxy and Anti-malware scanning but graphs are not reporting correct information at all. This is the feeling I have.

What about other guys on Community?

Regards

Hi, 

I'm Val, I'm a newbie here. I have notice in  Control Center that when my bandwidth becomes 1.5MB, my internet becomes slow, and when I tried to Ping for example google.com, the latency is reaching up to 200ms to 300ms plus.

Regards,