Decent bandwidth monitoring on PFsense?

DutchSamurai

Hello, I’ve been trying to figure this out for 3 weeks now but I’m getting nowhere.

I want PFsense to collect data usage so I (or some plugin) can generate a graph over a specific timeframe and show me the incoming/outgoing data along with total data usage over said period of time. The time period is not predefined so things will need to be logged.

I started out with all the packages form the PFsense documentation page but none of them suit my needs.

Next I set up SNMP with Cacti but that is inaccurate as hell even with 1 minute polling. Tried downloading some files but Cacti totally misses it unless the download lasts for a couple of minutes. My connection will mostly have HTTP/HTTPS traffic so whatever I use for logging must be able to handle peak traffic.

Is there any software I can use for this? Some of the real time PFsense packages would do I think but they don’t support logging… which is something I can really get my head around anyway because why make software that reads all that data but don’t make an option to log it? How often are you monitoring your firewall real time?

I’m now looking at Zabbix and Munin but that seems fairly difficult to get to work (Unix noob here) and no guarantee that it will give me the data I want as information on those software in combination with PFsense is few and far between.

Is there any way I can achieve what I want with PFsense or would I be better off with a different solution? (got a Fortigate as well, should be able to do some logging).

PS. Ntop graphs are all garbled up for some reason.

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willyy

What about the BandwidthD package?

Zorac

I needed to monitor for my isp, never did find anything that did what i needed exactly. tried a bunch of scripts/plugins/self made scripts/tools/rrd but ended up building something that runs on a raspberry pi (it was already running some weather sensors). no reason you couldn't run a similar set of scripts on your pfsense box.

alternately if you have a windows computer on the network running all the time, i found networx (free) worked great for the same purpose.

https://www.softperfect.com/products/networx/

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MikeV7896

vnstat was a package under pfSense 2.2.x that did well at keeping track of how much data is sent/received over each interface on your pfSense box. Alas, it hasn't yet been ported to 2.3, but one of the developers is working on it when he has some free time. It will be able to tell you how much data was transferred by day, week, month, etc. No definite timeline on its return, but it's a package that many have been asking to be ported for 2.3, especially if their ISP has data caps.

If you're looking for something that can break down how much traffic a particular host on your network is moving, darkstat is good for that. Make sure to check the option to only show data for your LAN, because otherwise it will also keep track of every internet host that is accessed by your LAN systems.

anigwei

Hi,

What about pfSense sending Netflows to an independent Ntop machine?

Regards,

Kei

@anigwei:

Hi,

What about pfSense sending Netflows to an independent Ntop machine?

Regards,

How can you do that?