Multi-Host Network Bandwidth Monitor

Question

I do a lot of (mostly WLAN) network-related troubleshooting and administrative tasks.

What I would like is a way to monitor the bandwidth usage of all network hosts in real-time. This way I can quickly locate bottlenecks, identify abusive hosts, and so on.

I could probably whip something up, but if there's something readily available, specifically for this purpose, I'll go with that.

Answer 1

If you are thinking of putting something together yourself you can monitor network usage in python using psutil, details here, and obviously in python it is simple enough to save &/or share those statistics.

However, for a ready rolled solution based on psutil:

• if your servers are all Linux you can use psdash which can either make each server have its own performance summary web page or one master server have the web interface for all of them.
• for mixed OS systems grr, while more complicated to set up, allows you to run flows, which can be used to gather data or perform other tasks on a client, and hunts which action flows on multiple clients that match a specification.

Answer 2

I run my kid's traffic on my LAN through a Pi running ntop - provides a nice graphical interface of hosts involved, how much bandwidth, etc.

https://www.ntop.org