Peak Bandwidth utilization

[vignesh2004]

Hello there,

I'm new to Cacti and I'm trying to figure my way through rrdtool,cacti and the various associated plugins. However I managed to setup basic Cacti for my Cisco Switches to try and monitor the bandwidth on my uplinks. I chose the following options and I see some discrepancy in the output from Cacti ( graphs ) and straight from the Cisco Switches:

I chose the "Interface - Traffic (bytes/sec, Total Bandwidth)" Graph template and did not make any modifications in the CDEF etc and in one of the sample outputs I see:

Outbound Maximum: 14.20 M ( Is this the maximum bandwidth? )

However, when I pull the stats straight from the switch:

5 minute output rate 219918000 bits/sec =~ 27.4 M

If "Outbound Maximum" doesn't mean the maximum Bandwidth the interface has seen in the last 5 minutes, please tell me how I can check the peak bandwidth of the switch over a period of time?

Cheers,
Vignesh