[colug-432] tracking WAN data usage

[William Yang]

pfSense has a lot of features around bandwitch monitoring.

I usually monitor bandwidth using snmp stats for the upstream interfaces 
(made more complex if you have multiple uplinks, such as VPN tunnels 
;-).  ntop does it (and at one point I had remote data collection 
working to pull ntop data from pfsense and doing offline analysis on a 
Linux box; not sure where that code went).... or netflow... or...  there 
may be more.



On 2016-10-08 15:15, Rick Hornsby wrote:
> My ISP does not currently have a per month data limit, and does not 
> provide us with any usage stats as such. However, with all the 
> nonsense coming out of Comcast and AT&T (including the stories of 
> being charged for grossly over-inflated data usage), it's got me 
> curious about my own usage. What does my usage look like now, and if I 
> found myself in a monopoly setting where there was only one 
> residential ISP, and they had usage caps - how would I measure it for 
> myself?
>
> As has been pointed out in these over-charging stories, unlike your 
> electric meter or your gas meter which is subject to the jurisdiction 
> of a PUCO type government body, there's absolutely no accountability 
> or transparency stopping Comcast from just making up a number - or 
> being wrong and trying to charge you for something you didn't use anyway.
>
> I have pfSense as my home router, and I have the ntop package running 
> but I'm finding a couple of challenges with it -
>
> * Any configuration changes to ntop reset all the statistics back to 
> zero (There's an option for keeping historical data, but it seems 
> clear from the UI that this should not be turned on.)
> * While I definitely like some of the detail (which I don't understand 
> yet), I'm having a hard time figuring out where the overall data used 
> number might be
>
> I have an extra pi, I was thinking of maybe having pfSense ship the 
> stats to that. Is there a better tool than ntop? Even if the only 
> stats I got were total data used, and maybe total (WAN?) data used by 
> device - I think that might be good enough.
>
> thanks!
>
>
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