Free bandwidth monitoring tools software for linux

bandwidth monitor is a small application which polls /proc/net/dev for the byte counts for a given network device , and calculates the RX and TX bandwidths. Originally a shell script, then a Perl script, now rewritten in C so that it can easily be used on embedded devices like the Linksys WRT54G as well as.

This program started as a shell script that I ran on my home-brew firewall wireless router (Linux, of course, on a 486/66) to keep track of my incoming and outgoing bandwidth. This let me know that I was getting the bandwidth that I paid for, and it also helped me keep an eye on the throttling of bulk traffic so that I didnt choke out my interactive sessions. Of course, that was before I had QOS.

The program is probably tied to Linux, since it grabs the byte counts for the requested interface right from /proc/net/dev. It could pretty easily be modified to grab the same information from the output of /sbin/ifconfig, but that would waste resources to spawn a new process to parse the /proc/net/dev file and regurgitate it to us. Also, I havent bothered to look at how uniform the output of the byte counts from /sbin/ifconfig is on other operating systems.

As a side note, the C version also uses nanosleep() and gettimeofday() to get more accurate polling intervals and track the overall time (since sleep(), usleep(), nanosleep(), et. al. only guaruntee to wait at least as long as you request, but do not guaruntee that it wont be possibly much longer...) So, if you were interested in porting it, youd have to make sure that nanosleep() and gettimeofday() were also available, or lose the resolution of the time used in bandwidth calculations.

BUILDING

$ gcc -O3 -o bandwidth_monitor bandwidth_monitor.c

Cimon is Perl program wich monitors the load (memory and CPU) on Cisco routers using SNMP, and generates graphics with statistics using rrdtool. Its good for information about your routers health.

It monitors and displays the cpu 5 minutes utilization in percents and free+used Processor memory. The I/O memory(usualy 2 MB) or Fast on high end routers is being monitored too, but there isnt graphic for it. Cimon is good source for information about your routers health. From version 0.2 cimon can do ip accounting using the cisco ip accounting feature.
The logfiles that it generates as the rrd files needed for the graphics are fully compatible with those produced by sasacct (SASs accounting statistics). So you can use its cgi interface also its posibility to generate graphics on demand or on a user defined interval (via crontab and -g option).

Bandwidth Management Tools is a total bandwidth management solution for Linux and can be used for firewalling, traffic graphing, and shaping.
Bandwidth Management Tools is not based on any currently-available bandwidth management software and supports packet queues, bursting, complex traffic flow hierarchies, flow groups, traffic logging, and a simple real-time monitoring front-end.
Main features:
- XML configuration file format:
- Class based traffic categorization
- POWERFULL for advanced users!!
- Firewalling:
- Support for all Netfilter features on host operating system
- Traffic shaping (flows):
- Shaping of blocks or single ip addresses
- Support for bursting based on user definable average period
- Multi-level shaping, you can define parents & grand parents
- Traffic logging:
- Logging of byte, packet, burst & drop counters
- Traffic flow grouping
- Misc:
- Atomic loading of firewall tables into kernel
- Supports more than 1 CPU
Whats New in 0.2.3 Release:
- Development snapshot 200602012132 has been released as stable.
- The URLs in graphs generated by bwm_graph has been fixed.
Whats New in 200603080716 Release:
- Logging directly to RRD files was added.
- Graphing was fixed, and error handling was improved.
- rrdtool was fixed so that if it is built at installation time, its also installed.
- New flow parameters were added: report-format, report-filename, and flow-mode.

IP Bandwidth Watchdog (ipband) is a pcap based IP traffic monitor. It tallies per-subnet traffic and bandwidth usage and starts detailed logging if specified threshold for the specific subnet is exceeded. If traffic has been high for a certain period of time, the report for that subnet is generated which can be appended to a file or e-mailed. When bandwidth usage drops below the threshold, detailed logging for the subnet is stopped and memory is freed.

This utility could be handy in a limited bandwidth WAN environment (frame relay, ISDN etc. circuits) to pinpoint offending traffic source if certain links become saturated to the point where legitimate packets start getting dropped.

It also can be used to monitor internet connection when specifying the range of local ip addresses (to avoid firing reports about non-local networks).

Argus Monitoring System software is a system and network monitoring application.
It will monitor nearly anything you ask it to monitor (TCP + UDP applications, IP connectivity, SNMP OIDS, Programs, Databases, etc).
It presents a nice clean, easy to view web interface that will keep both the managers happy (Red Bad. Green Good.) and the techs happy ("Ah! thats what the problem is").
It can send alerts numerous ways (such as via pager) and can automatically escalate if someone falls asleep.
Main features:
- It is open-source available at no charge.
- It has a clean and intuitive web interface.
- The web pages can easily be understood by non-technical people.
- It can generate graphs of what is going on.
- It can monitor network connectivity (Ping test)
- It can monitor TCP/UDP ports
- It can monitor a wide variety of TCP/UDP applications (HTTP, SMTP, RADIUS, ...)
- It can monitor the output or exit code of a program (Program test)
- It can monitor the content of a web page (such as a shopping cart application)
- It can monitor the authoritativeness of a nameserver
- It can monitor SNMP OIDs (such as BGP status, UPS voltage, room temperature, ...)
- It can monitor the results of SQL queries
- It can monitor itself.
- It can be extended to monitor things that the author didnt think of
- It can notify someone (or many people) when something happens
- It can escalate, and notify someone else, if things dont get fixed.
- It can not alarm for known downtime (maintenance overrides)
- It will summarize and rate-limit multiple notifications to prevent paging-floods.
- It keeps historical statistics, for analysis or SLA verification.
- It scales well and can monitor many, many things.
- It can restrict users to viewing only certain items (user "views")
- It can restrict users access to certain features (access control)
- It can support IPv6.
- It can support SNMPv3.
- It can support l10n for your native language.
- It can support redundant multi-server configurations.
Enhancements:
- This release offers improved performance and scalability, adds support for additional tests, and adds support for failover and redundancy.

Bandwidth Meter and Diagnostics is a Firefox extension that will automatically check whether Internet connection is working or not when a website can not be loaded, and a list of tools for network troubleshooting. Try to type a random domain name(e.g., qwqwqwq121212.com) to see what this means ...
This extension adds "Bandwidth Meter" to the Tools Menu. It performs the following tasks:
- Display your public IP address
- Display your public domain name
- Test download speed/bandwidth
- Test upload speed/bandwidth
This extension runs under any OS. If you use Windows, you could try our other Windows specific extension "Broadband Speed test and Diagnostics" that has extra features and can only run under Windows. We are creating this because we get many requests from non-windows users.