Monitoring Bandwidth on your server

Question

Hello all,

I use to be on a shared host and I could use there standard tools to look at bandwidth graph.

I now have my sites running on a dedicated server and I have no idea whats going on :P sigh

I have installed webmin on my Fedora core 10 machine and I would like to monitor bandwidth. I was about to setup the bandwidth module and it gave me this warning:

Warning - this module will log ALL network traffic sent or received on the 
selected interface. This will consume a large amount of disk space and CPU
time on a fast network connection.

Isn't there anything I can use that is more light weight and suitable for a NOOB? 'cough' Free tool 'cough'

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

vnStat is about as lightweight as they come. (There's plenty of front ends around if the graphs the command line tool gives aren't pretty enough.)

Answer 2

I use munin. It makes pretty graphs and can set up alerts if you're so inclined.

Answer 3

Unfortunately this is not for *nix but I have an automated process to analyise my IIS logs that moves them off the web server and analyises them with Web Log Expert. Provided the appropriate counter is turned on it gives me the bandwidth consumed for every element of the site.

The free version of their tool won't allow scripting but it does the same analysis. It supports W3C Extended and Apache (Common and Combined) log formats.

Answer 4

Take a look at mrtg. It's fairly easy to set up, runs a simple cron job to collect snmp stats from your router, and shows some reasonable and simple graphs. Data is stored in an RRD database (see the mrtg page for details) and can be mined for other uses as well.