Bandwidth Tracking?

[Skirge01]

I run pfSense at home in a VM and the latest version broke the addon I had been using for this purpose (BandwidthD). I can't seem to find something to replace it with. Does anyone have suggestions for what I could use? I'd prefer to avoid adding another piece of hardware to the mix, but I'd be okay with a virtual appliance. I use this primarily to track ongoing data usage for historical purposes, especially as the prevalence of data caps is spreading. Ideally, I'd like to be able to pull up at least the last year's worth of data, broken down by month.

[reggie14]

Did you try the darkstat package yet?

There's also the Traffic Totals package if you just need basic numbers on overall usage.

[Skirge01]

I hadn't, but I just installed it. Since I only just installed it, there's not much data, but there only appear to be 4 graphs (last: 60 sec, 60 min, 24h, and 31 days). Is that as far as it goes or will it build/add another graph when I reach day 32?

EDIT: I just looked closer at the graphs and it looks to be throughput (kb/s), as opposed to bandwidth (total usage). That's not what I'm looking for, but I appreciate the tip.

[reggie14]

Sorry- I knew there was something I didn't like about darkstat. That was one thing. The other thing is that while you can get tota usage figures for hosts (click the "hosts" tab on top), it's not clear when those numbers get reset.

As I noted in another thread, the bandwidth monitoring features of pfsense are pretty poor. Darkstat and ntopng are what's left, and ntopng doesn't keep historical data.

My basic recommendation would be to look for a free/cheap Netflow analyzer, and use the softflowd package in pfsense. I don't have a recommendation for a Netflow analyzer, though. Most of them are either expensive or very limited in functionality. If you get something set up, I'd love to hear about it.

[bcjenkins]

Have you looked at http://opnsense.org? I don't know if it does what you need but it does have some interesting reporting capabilities

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by reggie14

My basic recommendation would be to look for a free/cheap Netflow analyzer, and use the softflowd package in pfsense. I don't have a recommendation for a Netflow analyzer, though. Most of them are either expensive or very limited in functionality. If you get something set up, I'd love to hear about it.

Still looking. Definitely haven't found anything reasonably priced.

Originally Posted by bcjenkins

Have you looked at http://opnsense.org? I don't know if it does what you need but it does have some interesting reporting capabilities

I looked into that, but it has only been forked from pfSense for about a year now. I'm not willing to switch to something that new at this point. However, I may set it up in a VM to play around.

[Korny]

I had good luck with IPfire running in Virtualbox on my ubuntu 16.04 machine, very stable, minimal resources and rock solid.

[Skirge01]

It looks like IPFire is a fork of IPCop, which I used to run before switching to pfSense. I don't recall IPCop having the kind of bandwidth monitoring capability I'm looking for, if any at all. I didn't see anything about IPFire including this, but I didn't look very long. I do appreciate the tip, though!

I set up OPNsense in a VM and had it running in under 15 minutes, which is impressive, especially for a Linux novice like me. I'll have to play with it further because it does have a built-in Netflow Analyzer, which I'm pretty sure will meet my needs.