Bandwidth monitoring

[Jon Newson]

Adam,
i recommend using ipa, its part of the ports directory, latest is 1.3.4
in short you add an ipf rule to 'count' traffic on your
given interface (setup individual rules for the main ports such as 80/tcp
and 25/tcp).  The ipa config file then references those count rules
to keep a database of the stats, via a cron job.

Cheers,
Jon Newson - Systems Administrator
SDR Technologies

jon.newson at sdrct.com
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Freislich [mailto:ianf at za.uu.net]
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2003 5:54 PM
To: Lars Eggert
Cc: Adam; net at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Bandwidth monitoring 


Lars Eggert wrote:
> Adam wrote:
> > My ISP is placing strict restrictions on how much I can transfer each
> > month, with high penalties for exceeding their limits. However, they
> > don't provide any way for their customer's to check to see how much
> > they've transferred, so we end up transferring far less than what we are
> > allowed, just to make sure we avoid paying the fines for going over the
> > limit.
> > 
> > So, what I need to do is find a way to monitor my total bandwidth
> > through my external NIC. My gateway is running FreeBSD 4.8 with
> > ipf+ipnat. 
> > 
> > I *don't* need anything fancy. All I need is to be able to check at any
> > time how much I've transferred since the first of the month. What's the
> > easiest way to set up something like this? I know there are fancy
> > solutions with graphs with usage stats and such, but that's not what I'm
> > after.
> 
> What's wrong with netstat?

Won't that count all the ethernet frames and local ethernet broadcasts
which probably won't be billed for?  We had this problem using
router (ethernet) interface counters to measure traffic in our
hosting center.  The trouble is that any traffic between servers
on the same physical network is counted even though it isn't routed
and shouldn't be billed for.

It's pretty unfair of your ISP to charge you for useage without
providing any mechanism for you to keep tabs on what they're measuring
throughout the month.

I would suggest that you find out exacly how they measure your
traffic useage. ie do they measure only packets that were switched
by their router or just any and every single byte that their router's
ethernet interface sees.  The first is IMHO much more fair than the
second because trafic local to your IP network won't be charged.

I can give you a hand setting up a graph like:
http://www.digs.iafrica.com/20030520_00h00-20030620_00h00.gif
This is _really_ simple to do and if you have managers, they will
really like the green changes to red when you go over the limit.

Ian
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