Hello,

I am going to be working on a project for a customer that will involve replacing their core switching enviornment. It's not a very big enviornment (150 users), but there are very high availability requirements. They have mixed vendor network, made mostly of low-end managed switches. So, I need to take a baseline of their network before I recommend a solution.

Specifically I am trying to:

- establish current network utilization. IE: this switch is at %50 utlization, or this port is consistently at %100 utilization.

- establish current metrics - ie to ping from this port to this host has 5ms of delay, etc

- characterize their netword - ie, their traffic is very broadcast intensive, and that is what is slowing everything down.

This would be so that:

- we will be able to design the right solution for their network.

- After the solution is implemented, we can run the same tools and show a tangible difference (rather than relying on end-user perceptions).

Would Cisco Discovery tool do that for me? I thought that it would, but I read the site on it, and it appears to be more of an inventory tool.

If not, what else would you recommend? I have a few other tools that I am looking into, but more feedback is always welcome. I plan on attaching a computer to their network for approx 5-7 days. I expect that whatever I use is going to use SMTP. Is syslog of any benefit here? I have done similar things in the past, but this project is so focused on performance and I think this reporting is going to be so key to success (and customer's perception of success) that I want to revisit and get some feedback from the community.

Thanks,