Firewall – Real-time traffic monitoring router / firewall device

bandwidthfirewallrouter

I'm looking for a router & firewall device that will provide built-in bandwidth monitoring; meaning, I go to the web control panel for the device and I can see a real-time breakdown of how much traffic each IP is using (and even better, identify the MAC of each machine so I can exclude them from the network if necessary). I know there's third party solutions that can analyze syslogs in real time, but really what I want is a simple, plug-and-play device that offers this kind of real-time analysis out of the box.

Best Answer

I'm going to advocate Pfsense again. PFsense can by default graph outgoing / ingoing bandwidth. If you add the Bandwithd plugin, you can graph the traffic coming out of each node of your network on a per-IP basis. It even displays the type of traffic.

It's really simple to setup and works very well. You can put in transparently on your network by putting it in network bridge.

Related Solutions

Monitoring – Network Traffic Monitoring Techniques

I'm assuming you have a commercial router/switch, it most likely has SNMP which you can combine with MRTG for a nice traffic graph.

Router – Monitoring router bandwidth usage via Nagios and SNMP

I did this with a cron script, stores current value in a temp file then next time uses it to calculate bandwidth utilization since last run.

#!/bin/bash

email_address=""
router_ip=""

# 80% BANDWIDTH [ (384000bps) 48,000Bps ] - 20% = 38,400 Bps
alertBW="76800"

lastBWFile="/var/log/ciscoGW.log"
lastBW=`cat $lastBWFile | awk '{print$2}'`
lastTime=`cat $lastBWFile | awk '{print$1}'`

curBW=` snmpget  -c snmap_name -v 1 $router_ip IF-MIB::ifOutOctets.2  | awk '{print$4}'`

let diffBW=$curBW-$lastBW
#echo "Diff BW: $diffBW"
timeNow=`date +%s`
let diffTime=$timeNow-$lastTime
let alertBW=$alertBW*$diffTime

echo "$timeNow $curBW" > $lastBWFile

if [ $diffBW -gt $alertBW ]; then
#       echo "Over limit!"
        echo "Bandwith used over $diffTime seconds: $diffBW" | mail -s "BANDWIDTH OVER LIMIT!!!!" $email_address
fi

Since I was more interested in actual peaks I've since moved to using rrdtool:

#start 15 minutes ago
#end 5 minutes ago since rrdtool queries every 5 minutes 
rrdtool fetch $FROM MAX -s -900 -e -300

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Monitoring – Network Traffic Monitoring Techniques

Router – Monitoring router bandwidth usage via Nagios and SNMP

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