Per IP/ per app reporting?
-
Hello, I don't yet use pfSense, and I'm trying to determine if it supports a desire of mine in a router. What I'd like to see is some kind of daily/hourly reporting on per IP, per app data usage. Obviously, I don't expect pfSense to magically know if someone is using MS Word, but if someone dumps 2 GB of data in youtube via the router, I'd like to be able to see this.
As an example, here's a stack exchange thread that shows an image of the kind of data I'm looking for (scroll down a bit for the image):
http://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/1289/home-router-that-logs-per-device-internet-usage
(It doesn't have to be this pretty.. I just want to know if my 13 year old daughter is staying up in the middle of the night throwing gigabytes of into youtube or if she suddenly becomes addicted to facebook.)
Thank you
Gary -
pfSense itself doesn't provide per-device reporting, but there are a couple of add-on packages that can provide that capability.
DarkStat is one that can provide it, though it doesn't provide persistent data across reboots.
I believe - but it's been a while since I've used it, so I don't remember for certain - that ntop can provide that info as well. In reality, though, it's a much more thorough network monitoring tool, and can provide lots of different insight into what goes on on the network. ntop is currently available to people using the 2.3.2 development builds of pfSense, though it's expected that it will be released for general use in the very near future.
-
Thank you for the reply…
@virgiliomi:
…but there are a couple of add-on packages that can provide that capability.
Good, I posted in the right section. (I was concerned about that.. being a new user and all.)
@virgiliomi:
DarkStat … ntop...
Do these packages provide just overall traffic per device, or can they show what traffic type (app or app categories) are using the traffic per device?
Take care
Gary -
Darkstat can show all of the individual hostnames/IP addresses that a LAN device connects to. There's no mechanism for "apps" or "categories" that I'm aware of, only a list of every host/IP address on the internet that has accessed.
I don't remember enough about ntop to accurately say anything further about its capabilities. It's a good bit more robust than Darkstat, IIRC… so I wouldn't be surprised if there was some way to group hostnames into apps or categories... but I just don't know. Maybe someone can chime in with some info about ntop, now that 2.3.2 is released and ntop is now available to everyone.
