Is the Network Performance counter "Bytes Total/sec" is reliable

Question

All,

I'm building a network intensive application to consume real time financial marketdata and the network team is suspicious regarding its bandwidth usage per instance.

I'm trying to use the System.Diagnostic performance counter "Bytes Total/sec" in the "Network interface" to get an idea of my application footprint on the network.

Here is my question : Can I compare the data measure by this performance counter with the data gather by the network team (they are using a probe on a Cisco router to monitor the traffic on a specific port between 2 machines) or is it 2 differents things ?

How the performance counter is compared to the real network usage as seen at the network level ? Optimistic or pessimistic.

Thanks for any though you can provide.

Regards

Answer 1

I worked on an application like this not too long ago. The performance counter tended to report less traffic for several reasons. Packets filtered by the firewall didn't make it into the Perf Counter count. Multicast traffic didn't always make it into the Perf Counter count.

For the most part the numbers trended together (e.g., initiating a large download would ramp up both the count on the router probe and and ramp up the count on the performance counter).