Bandwidth Monitoring Tool

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TomasW

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Hi All,

Can anyone recommend a good bandwidth monitoring tool to keep track of my downloads, uploads and speeds?:D
 
Monitoring PC's:

I'm using NetLimiter 2 Pro, but I'm not sure if it would work on Windows 7 x64 yet. They have a beta version out, but its not capable of showing statistics yet :( I bought it thinking that I could get better support for Windows 7 x64, which didn't happen.
Other than the issue with Windows 7 x64 I'm very happy with it. It has remote administration features, statistics, speed limiters, etc.
The best thing for me about NetLimiter is that you can specify the network zones. Like I'm connected to SCN (Stb Community Network - its like a WUG), University of Stellenbosch & ADSL at the same time :)
If you just want to keep track of stuff, you could get the NetLimiter 2 Monitor, which is free.

Then there's DU Meter, which is unfortunately only available in a 30-day trial version. I'm not 100% sure if it can show you per application the traffic generated like NetLimiter can do.

BandwidthD is also free and supported on Linux too. A cool/prominent feature is that it actually logs the traffic per IP, so you can see how much traffic was generated to a specific host - unlike NetLimiter which only logs per Application per zone.

NetMeter is also free, but its very limited in comparison with the previous applications. It's only capable of showing the current upload & download speed (including a graph) and the day/week's total usage.

AnVir is a TaskManager like utility that also shows upload & download speeds. Its quite an advanced utility, but not all the versions are free. I haven't used it yet, but it looks quite promising.
​

Applications for monitoring router traffic:

PRTG Traffic Grapher is available in free- and trial versions (same setup file). Your router/switch has to have SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) functionality if you want to use it properly. The application also supports Packet Sniffing, that allows you to monitor the traffic on your own PC too and not just traffic going through the router/switch.
The same company has a more powerful tool, namely PRTG Network Monitor, which is not free (available in trial version though).​

If you have a whole network that you want to monitor, firewall & proxy, then have a look at Smoothwall. The_Librarian is myBB's Smoothwall expert/support.
 
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i use networx and its quite informative and free tells you pppoe account usages per hour, session and rates. It also has a graph
 
You can try the South African boytjie app called MyDumeter (free)

I see the older version DuMeter 3.0 says its a 30 day trial but works without expiring
 
NetLimiter 3 Beta 6 is out, although it doesn't have statistics yet. It's nice to see which applications are utilizing the network, but it won't be able to say how much cap they've used. If you're using Windows XP, then you can use NetLimiter 2 Monitor, which has the stats function and its free.

Instead of using netstat -a -n -b, which can be quite slow, use TCPView from SysInternals. It's only capable of showing the active connections and the associated application. Unfortunately it won't tell you how much data has been transfered.

There's another application from SysInternals, called Process Monitor, which monitors processes for registry, file and network activity. The network activity would display the bytes sent/received for each package, as well as the application name that exchanged the packet. Unfortunately it cannot show an aggregated view, however you can adjust the filters to exclude your downloading apps from showing.

SASA (ADSL Statistics Analyser) is a shareware application made by Antibody Software that allow you to monitor your ADSL account usage by retrieving the totals from the respective ISP's websites. Since its shareware, you have to pay for it if you want to monitor more than 1 account. Unfortunately it doesn't support Afrihost AFAIK.

I was quite impressed with Comodo Internet Security too. It has a very good firewall and its also capable of showing stats of the data exchanged per application. Another reason to use it is that its free :)

BitDefender and ZoneAlarm can also firewall & monitor your network. I am impressed with both, but they aren't available in free versions AFAIK.
 
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Another vote for Netlimiter and networx. I have used networx for the last couple of months, then discovered netlimiter. The huge advantage of netlimiter is that you can limit the bandwith used by a specific application. Usefull if I want to download stuff, but also want to have something left to surf the internet. Then I just throttle down the download manager in netlimiter, leaving some data for exporer.

But both of these are awesone utilities....
 
I myself am still looking for an application that can attribute bandwidth use to IP addresses. I have found a realtime application that unfortunately couldn't save or aggregate the data. It works great though - NADetector.
 
Pada said:
NetLimiter 3 Beta 6 is out, although it doesn't have statistics yet. It's nice to see which applications are utilizing the network, but it won't be able to say how much cap they've used. If you're using Windows XP, then you can use NetLimiter 2 Monitor, which has the stats function and its free.

Instead of using netstat -a -n -b, which can be quite slow, use TCPView from SysInternals. It's only capable of showing the active connections and the associated application. Unfortunately it won't tell you how much data has been transfered.

There's another application from SysInternals, called Process Monitor, which monitors processes for registry, file and network activity. The network activity would display the bytes sent/received for each package, as well as the application name that exchanged the packet. Unfortunately it cannot show an aggregated view, however you can adjust the filters to exclude your downloading apps from showing.

SASA (ADSL Statistics Analyser) is a shareware application made by Antibody Software that allow you to monitor your ADSL account usage by retrieving the totals from the respective ISP's websites. Since its shareware, you have to pay for it if you want to monitor more than 1 account. Unfortunately it doesn't support Afrihost AFAIK.

I was quite impressed with Comodo Internet Security too. It has a very good firewall and its also capable of showing stats of the data exchanged per application. Another reason to use it is that its free :)

BitDefender and ZoneAlarm can also firewall & monitor your network. I am impressed with both, but they aren't available in free versions AFAIK.
Click to expand...


I am using SASA (ADSL Statistics Analyser) v0.16, (the one you can load 5 accounts), it works fine with my normal AfriHost account and Prepaid AfriHost account.
 
Sackboy said:
That doesn't tell you WHAT downloaded how much. I'd like to know WHERE the cap is going, as apposed to how much is getting used and when.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately NetworX can't give you that information, like NetLimiter could. NetworX does have a tool to display the Netstats, which is simply the list of current network connections, containing the source & destination IP addresses, ports & protocols. Its a nice utility to check your overall data transferred.

Ghxst said:
I've looked into the above mentioned tools but I'm looking for something that monitor's the latency of a line.
Something like http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/8946/screenshot021r.jpg

Pada linked that image in a previous topic, and I would like to know which application it is.

Thanks in advance
Click to expand...
I can't remember posting an image/screenshot like that. PRTG grapher is the most likely utility that can do draw graphs like that. I'm pretty sure that it could draw latency graphs, but it might not be that simple/easy to configure as opposed to some of the other applications that doesn't have much to configure either.

snail112 said:
I am using SASA (ADSL Statistics Analyser) v0.16, (the one you can load 5 accounts), it works fine with my normal AfriHost account and Prepaid AfriHost account.
Click to expand...
SASA is nice to have when you are using multiple Internet accounts. AFAIK, SASA is simply logging in on the respective ISP websites to retrieve the cap usage. The downside of using the ISP's websites would be that it can't show realtime statistics (usually the ISP's show stats accurate to an hour) and that it can't show the source (like the PC that generated the traffic).
 
I'm pleased to announce that they've released NetLimiter 3 Beta 8 (* click More for the download links) at last! The latest release includes the stats module which most of us were waiting for!
They've also updated their version 2, by fixing a few bugs/driver related issues.

I'm actually running Netlimiter version 2.0.10 Pro on Win7 x64 without any problems, although it was bit of a mission to get it installed (had to use compatibility mode).
 
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