September 10, 2017
April 5, 2017
How to monitor bandwidth/traffic usage on a router
Usually users dont care about their Internet traffic usage, especially on broadband lines as ISP’s provide unmetered bandwidth.
Unfortunately it is not the case for everyone, I have to pay for every single gigabyte of traffic that I use to my ISP. Can you believe that !?
Recently I noticed my ISP usage statistics are a tad high, so I decided to log my usage myself and compare it to my ISP stats.
I have a Mikrotik router which is somewhat advanced, so I expected an easy straight forward solution to measure my daily traffic, but to my surprise I was wrong.
Most solutions available are inaccurate -like query speed of interface every 5 minutes and calculate an estimate- or hard to implement and overkill.
So I came up with a novel idea. Here is the principle:
Most routers keep inbound & outbound bandwidth counters of their network interfaces. If we can query these numbers through SNMP on predefined intervals, we can calculate interface traffic precisely.
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