I’ve been getting repeated emails from my ISP about “exceeding my bandwidth cap” and they feel very incorrect.

My current router is a Cisco RV260, and it doesn’t have a great way of tracking traffic. (There’s a port traffic screen that does give tx/rx bytes, but no way to see any date ranges).

Is there anything out there that can give an accurate account of Internet traffic? It would be nice if I could see destination domain/IPs, just for kicks and giggles, but an overall traffic count is all I really need.

Thanks!

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Cisco came up with Netflow for detailed traffic monitoring years ago but who knows if your device supports it. You’ll need a server on your home network that will collect the summaries from your router.

    ntopng is a common open source version of this concept, with an appropriate sensor. It can tell you exactly how many bits have been sent from what device to what upstream host. It’ll also tell you the traffic type (HTTPS, QUIC, BitTorrent, etc.), what country the IP is in, and so forth.

    Note that for long-term data storage, you may need a hard drive of considerable size. The size of the data export depends on how many unique sessions your network is setting up, but if you’re getting bandwidth warnings from your ISP I would think you’ll make quite a few.

    There’s a good chance your router doesn’t support the right protocols to set this up. In that case, you can periodically collect statistics and information over SNMP. It won’t be nearly as detailed, but it should allow you to graph network usage over time.

    This is the guide for setting up flow exports for Cisco hardware: https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/security/stealthwatch/netflow/Cisco_NetFlow_Configuration.pdf

    Here is the ntopng guide: https://www.ntop.org/guides/ntopng/what_is_ntopng.html

    There are alternatives for ntopng, be sure to look around for what suits you best.