Monitoring Bandwidth

RemusX2 · 08-09-2005, 06:56 PM

I will be heading off to live in the dorms in about 2 weeks and was informed that they monitor the bandwidth pretty heavily. 2GB d/l per day is what they say they allow roughly. Is there a way to monitor how much data I have transfered in a day? I would like to stay as close to my 2GB limit as possible because I'm paying for the connection so might as well use it. Thanks

Remus

Artanicus · 08-09-2005, 07:20 PM

ifconfig itself shows sent(TX) and recieved(RX) bytes since the connection was acquired, so if you dont keep your machine on 24/7, or reset your connection every 24 hours, this would make a simle way of monitoring it:

Code:

ifconfig | grep RX | grep bytes | cut -d "(" -f 2 | cut -d ")" -f 1

That snippet will get you the info you want neatly.. Ofcourse there is prolly some nifty program for better monitoring, but hey, thats what search engines are for, right? (;

edit:
Put up quicly a nicer output and interface to that quick grepping.. Its set up so that if you give any parameter at all, also the second interface is shown, if no parameter is given, only the first is shown. Just to show you an idea:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
echo -n "|eth0|"
echo -n " down: "
echo -n $(ifconfig | grep bytes | cut -d "(" -f 2 | cut -d ")" -f 1 | head -n 1)

echo -n "  |  up: "
ifconfig | grep bytes | cut -d "(" -f 3 | cut -d ")" -f 1 | head -n 1

if [ ! -z $1 ]; then
echo -n "|eth1|"
echo -n " down: "
echo -n $(ifconfig | grep bytes | cut -d "(" -f 2 | cut -d ")" -f 1 | head -n 2 | tail -n 1)

echo -n "  |  up: "
ifconfig | grep bytes | cut -d "(" -f 3 | cut -d ")" -f 1 | head -n 2 | tail -n 1

fi

Bruce Hill · 08-09-2005, 07:45 PM

Not as nice as a script, and I'm not even sure of the accuracy,
but with GkrellM you can hover your mouse over the eth0
(or appropriate) NIC display window, and a small rectangle will
appear in the bottom right of that area. Then just click on the
rectangle and you will get a window pop up with statistics for
Daily, Weekly, and Monthly received, transmitted, and total.

watsoncj · 10-15-2005, 02:59 PM

This info is available in /proc/net/dev but it is pretty hard to read as is. Running it through something like the following can clean it up. But it still needs some work.

Code:

awk '/eth0/ {print "Rx total:",$2,"b\nTx total:",$10,"b"}' /proc/net/dev

Itzac · 10-15-2005, 04:42 PM

GKrellM has a lot more configurability and can keep track of your usage over the course of a month or a week, regardless of restarts. Of course you could just as easily write up a script to keep a daily, weekly, and/or monthly total in a log somewhere.

Get creative, and be sure to let us know what you come up with.