Monitoring home network traffic... Solutions?

[MannDude]

Anyone here have a good recommendation on monitoring all at-home network traffic? I moved out to the country side and aside from Satelite Internet (no thanks) my only other option was the slightly better Wireless Internet from a local company. Better speeds and reliability, but I still have monthly data caps.

I'd like to be able to monitor and measure all traffic on my network at home so I can compare my measured usage against the ISP's measurement.

Unfortunately my cheap-o router doesn't measure such things.

Thoughts? (Note: some devices connect via wlan whereas others connect via eth0)

 

[Monk]

You could obtain an edgerouter device and enable SNMP and then have a remote VPS graph it via rrdtool/mrtg over snmp.

Or, you could come up with a very small device, like a mini-pc, that sits in front of everything and you could use some traffic counters to measure data, per protocol. Think of SFlow/Netflow type of traffic. However, you'd need probably 2 ethernet ports, and a decent CPU to switch packets to/from.

You /have/ to make sure you put it front of all of your networking gear, otherwise it will start counting TCP retransmits from poorly connected devices, and inflating your bandwidth usage.

 

[bsdguy]

"my router doesn't do that" is somewhat of a poor basis to come up with suggestions. It might be helpful to tell us somewhat more about that box. Another helpful hint would be whether you are thinking about putting another cheap box in front of your router.

Two somewhat crude suggestions I could see is a) iftop and b) driver or firewall bookkeeping. At least (b) should be available with pretty any unixish router os.

 

[Jonathan]

pfSense would be great for this. It's got some plugins in it's repos that can do just this.