bandwidth monitor that can tell between local/internet traffic

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nicolas9510

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 21, 2006
Messages
169
Hey, ive been using Bandwidth monitor 3.4 from bwmonitor.com for a while now.
since i finally finished my movie server and have it on the network,
i find the need to have a program that can monitor bandwidth but can differenciate between local traffic and regular in/outgoing internet traffic.
I tried PRTG but didnt really work well for me.
Does anyone know if a program can do this? if so any suggestions would be awesome.

thanks
 
Unless you have a smart switch (and even if you do), regular SNMP utilities are not going to give you details other than bandwidth usage. Wireshark would be another choice, but you need to be able to span a port to monitor the traffic.

With a Cisco switch you could use Netflow, but I don't know how to get the equivalent stats from a non-managed switch short of putting a transparent firewall (like Untangle) in the middle, but even that will only monitor exactly what goes through it - not your whole network.

I don't have a product in mind, but you are concerned only about the sessions to/from a particular box (like your Server), an application that resides on the server and logs activity is probably best.
 
I'm pretty sure the program you're using already has the capability. As long as you're using two different network adapters then you can set a graph for each one separately.
 
Valnar said:
but you are concerned only about the sessions to/from a particular box (like your Server), an application that resides on the server and logs activity is probably best.
Click to expand...
no, i dont care about the traffic to the server from my pc
i just need to monitor the traffic from the internet so that i dont pass my comcast download/upoad cap :(

@rive22
if i did have 2 network adaptors, how would i set one for local traffic only? if that is even possible, the same goes for internet traffic only.
because if i am connected to my router, i can get on the net and my local server so i dont see how having 2 separate nics would help
 
nicolas9510 said:
no, i dont care about the traffic to the server from my pc
i just need to monitor the traffic from the internet so that i dont pass my comcast download/upoad cap :(
Click to expand...

Hmm..sounds like a great package idea for pfSense (not that it helps now).

OP: If you have more than one PC in the house, you'll need something at the firewall level. And if you don't really care about what the traffic is, there may be a simple SNMP or Syslog logging utility that will aggregate the total bandwidth going in and out and total it for you per month (if the FW supports that). Once again, I don't know if such an animal exists, but it gives you something to look for.

What is your firewall?
 
Valnar said:
Hmm..sounds like a great package idea for pfSense (not that it helps now).
Click to expand...

pfsense already has bandwidth monitoring per interface, anything on the wan interface would count against your monthly cap. I've never used a software based bandwidth monitor, but I can't see why this wouldn't be an easy feature to add, I'm surprised you're having any trouble at all finding something to do this.
 
if your router supports snmp set up MRTG anf graph with cacti, just find out the MIBS for your router and monitor the ingress/egress for the outside interface, no local traffic on there :)
 
aaronearles said:
pfsense already has bandwidth monitoring per interface, anything on the wan interface would count against your monthly cap. I've never used a software based bandwidth monitor, but I can't see why this wouldn't be an easy feature to add, I'm surprised you're having any trouble at all finding something to do this.
Click to expand...

Well, I am not looking for the OP. Only offering suggestions. That's good that pfSense offers this. It totals the amount of bandwidth per month? I only see a rolling month calculation.
 
Oh no, I know, I was referring to him having trouble finding it, I wasn't looking either - just assumed there must be some out there.

You're right, it just shows the last 30 days, I guess that's not 100% accurate but should give a pretty good idea of your overall bandwidth usage.
 
The difficulty in doing this is that most bandwidth monitors don't actually examine the traffic, they just look at byte counts on the interface, which don't take the destination network into account.

The solution is to move the monitoring to the gateway device. I use vnstat for this; it has no 2GB rollover issue and keeps persistent state after reboots. There's a pfSense package, and I think it's also available for dd-wrt/Tomato (or at least something very similar is there) and such.

Otherwise you need to examine every packet to/from your machine, which will have performance implications, and I'm not aware of anything that does this elegantly just for bandwidth monitoring.
 
Valnar said:
Hmm..sounds like a great package idea for pfSense (not that it helps now).
Click to expand...

well i dont really want to use yet another server just for pfsense. my room gets hot enough as it with my main rig and server.
and even if i did, i would need to get a pci network card with multiple ports.

i will take a look at ntop to see if that would work for me.
if not i can just monitor traffic on the main rig and the server, and just manually check the differences between each other.

thanks for all the help/responses
 
Ntop monitors flows, not just interfaces. It tracks who talked to who when, how much, and on what protocol.

It will need to sit on it's own server, but you could run it in a VM if you have enough physical interfaces on the host. Ntop will need to either sit on a monitor port, or be a bridge between your clients and the internet.

The one drawback I've had with Ntop is that it really only functions well with real time monitoring - up to 24 hours. My experience has been that if you really need to track usage at this granular of a level over long periods of time, you'll need to spend some big bucks for something like Solarwinds. And the more active the link, the higher the load on the flow collector.

I'd love to hear opinions about experiences with other collectors...
 
DD-WRT does this. http://192.168.1.1/Status_Internet.asp

DDWRT_Traffic.png
 
well damn, i never even saw that in there
many thanks invisibill, exactly what i was looking for :)
 
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