GUI for iftop or equivalent

cr_hyland · Jan 1, 2012, 10:21 PM

Is there any package with a GUI for iftop or an equivalent package that can display realtime traffic and bandwith usage with both source and destination ip?

This is an essential tool we need to monitor our network. We used to run several Smoothwall firewalls before we switched to pfsense and this was a basic feature included in every version and it became our primary monitoring tool.

If there is nothing currently available would any one be ingerested in getting together and paying for it to be developed?
Or are there any skilled people feeling generous with their time that could build a GUI for iftop?

Cheers.

wallabybob · Jan 1, 2012, 10:48 PM

What do you want that isn't in the dash board interface statistics widget or dashboard traffic graphs widget or Status -> RRD Graphs?

cr_hyland · Jan 1, 2012, 10:55 PM

None of them show realtime bandwidth with source and destination ip info at the same time.

Traffic Graph and Rate are very useful but no source ip info so its very hard to track who is consuming bandwidth from the outside world.

marcelloc · Jan 2, 2012, 1:51 AM

Did you tried diagnostics-> pfTop?

cr_hyland · Jan 2, 2012, 10:18 AM

Yes, we currently use a combination of the traffic graph page, ifTop and pfTop to give us the info we need but if we had everything combined on one page like the traffic graph page with ifTop on the right in place of the current Rate representation then we would have everything we need in one easy GUI for monitoring our network utilisation.

Im sure there are many others out there who would have a use for this, that is the general consensus i've gathered from my searches on this forum.

jimp · Jan 3, 2012, 2:52 PM

I've looked into this before and as far as I can tell, iftop doesn't have a way to sample for a couple seconds and then quit. That would be a requirement in order to make it show properly in the GUI. The other tools that update that way (pftop, top, rate, etc) all can do a short sample and exit, and we take that output.

I'd love to find a way to make iftop work in the GUI though, I use it all the time in the shell.

marcelloc · Jan 3, 2012, 4:46 PM

It's not that beautifull but works :)

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/iftop -ni bce1_vlan100 > iftop.log &
/bin/sleep 5
/usr/bin/killall iftop

the result file can be read by tail for example.

jimp · Jan 3, 2012, 4:42 PM

Yeah that isn't ideal… Might be good enough for a package though.

(FYI, you probably really want iftop -pPnNi vr0 to make sure you also get port numbers and all traffic on the interface)

luke240778 · Jan 4, 2012, 12:51 PM

i also would like something like what the original poster is looking for, but in the meantime.. is there a way of changing the amount of IP's that is shown on the Traffic Graph? I mean, that gives a good idea of current usage, but never shows more than say 10 IP's that are connected and surfing. I would like to see them all

cr_hyland · Jan 4, 2012, 1:07 PM

Its good to see a bit of interest in this.

What is involved in building a package to use the code above for ifTop?

Can anyone out there build this or is it solely a job for the pfSense devs?

stephenw10 · Jan 4, 2012, 1:31 PM

Anyone can write a package and submit it if you've got the skills! ;)

See: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Developing_Packages

If not then consider raising a bounty to get it done.

Steve