Bandwidth monitoring per IP device?

December 4, 2007 2:39 PM

Bandwidth monitoring per IP device?

I'm looking for a way to monitor bandwidth on a wireless LAN. I need to be able to see how much bandwidth any particular device on the LAN is using at any given time. This can be shown by IP address or MAC address.

Ideally, it would break down like...

192.168.1.a is using 654kbit
192.168.1.b is using 322kbit
192.168.1.c is using 12kbit
192.168.1.d is using 0kbit

How could I accomplish this? Would the router need any special features/logging/etc?

Bear in mind that most devices on the network will not be able to run an SNMP client.

posted by doomtop to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You want netflow or netflow like statistics. If the AP is the layer 3 gateway or your gateway is a Cisco router you can export the netflow statistics and use Netqos or any number of free and not free products to analyze and correlate the data.

Other network products support netflow, but I don't have much in the way of expertise on those, so no suggestions there.
posted by iamabot at 2:44 PM on December 4, 2007

MikroTik routers have this information easily accessible via webpage statistics, command-line interface, and GUI. We use their RouterOS on dedicated hardware, but you can also run their RouterOS on any X86 machine. If you only need to do this for a little while, you can use the software for free for 24 hours (timer stops when the router is off).

I'd highly recommend the software, it's very capable.
posted by odinsdream at 2:51 PM on December 4, 2007

@odinsdream: I have access to dozens of MikroTik routerboards and am behind one currently. I was not aware that they had this ability. Can you please explain how I can utilize one to show this breakdown of bandwidth information?
posted by doomtop at 2:58 PM on December 4, 2007

Cacti + SNMP. Most OSes have SNMP implementations available for the installing.
posted by rhizome at 3:03 PM on December 4, 2007

doomtop, you'll want to configure queues that specify whatever groups you wish to have graphs for. You can do this through the Winbox configuration tool by doing the following:

Click Queues, find the Simple Queues tab. Add a new Queue and place the IP you wish to graph in the Target Address. If you want to group more than one address, continue adding IPs by clicking the down arrows. Click OK.

For live data, you'll see it in the Simple Queues window right away. To review historical data, you'll have to enable graphing. I'm not sure why this isn't possible through the Winbox interface, but it doesn't seem to be. So, open up a New Terminal.

In the new terminal, type:

/tool graphing queue

Now, you can either create separate graphs for each queue by name, or just have it auto-create graphs for any queues now and in the future. I prefer the latter, so now type add

Open a connection to the router in a web browser. You should see something like this. "pudge" is a graph generated by monitoring any IPs on my network that use bittorrent.

Note that you can also enable general interface graphs by executing add from /tool graphing interface, as well.
posted by odinsdream at 3:38 PM on December 4, 2007

*Note, you can either open the browser directly to the router then click Graphs, or go directly to http://routeraddress/graphs
posted by odinsdream at 3:40 PM on December 4, 2007

Packeteer's PacketShaper (and other related products) does this, and can limit people to boot. Depending on your budget and intended use, it may be either just the ticket or overkill.
posted by RikiTikiTavi at 11:15 PM on December 4, 2007

I should add that once you set up the Simple Queue as I described, not only can you view the bandwidth graph and instantaneous rates, but you can specify separate upload and download limits for the target.

In addition, you can get really fancy and use the Burst Mode limit feature to allow, for instance, insanely good speed test results, but cut it down to 50KBps after a minute of usage over that amount.
posted by odinsdream at 6:05 AM on December 5, 2007