[mrtg] Traffic (incoming, outcoming) - what does it correspond to??

[Steve Shipway]

> I'm sorry but I'm not very well-versed in all things network and server
> related, so this may be a really dumb post, but I'm trying to understand
> the graphs related to traffic on my website.

Do not make the mistake of confusing web site traffic (IE, number of page impressions) with network traffic (number of bytes transferred on the wire).

If you have a simple web page, it might be a couple of K of data.  However a download of a big file might be thousands of times greater - but in both cases, its only one 'click'.

MRTG is great for monitoring network traffic.  If you want to analyse your web site visits (per click or per session) then you'd be better off with a utility like webtrends to analyse your web server logs.

Your big peaks in September may correspond to your updating the web site - if you do a big update or big backup then this may be lots of network traffic, although no web server impressions.  Also, a lot of people just visiting page 1 and then going away will not make much of an impression.

Steve