Bandwidth Usage Probe

How we monitor bandwidth usage in pfsense?

There are several methods for monitoring bandwidth usage, with different levels of granularity.

•             1 pftop

•             2 trafshow

•             3 Built-in Graphs

•             4 BandwidthD

•             5 Darkstat

•             6 NTOP

•             7 Monitoring on Multiple Interfaces

•             8 Netflow

•             9 vnstat

Now we discuss here about ntop.

Ntop

ntop is a network probe that shows network usage in a way similar to what top does for processes.ntop is based on libpcap  and it has been written in a portable way in order to virtually run on every Unix platform. If you need even more detail than that, you might need the ntop  package,(Ntop Package:

What is ntop? Ntop is a network probe that shows network usage in a way similar to what top does for processes. In interactive mode, it displays the network status on the user’s terminal. In web mode it act as a web proxy server, creating an HTML dump of the network

Ntop is a most important tool.

Go to the diagnose tab and select ntop

When we type LAN IP address of PFSense on browser it is necessary to add colon and 3000 port number for opening the ntop. Like as

192.168.0.2:3000

This address automatically redirect on this URL.

http://192.168.0.2:3000/sortDataIP.html


which can also be found under System > Packages. It can break down detail by IP, protocol, and so on. Once installed, it appears under Diagnostics > ntop. It will even track where connections were made by local PCs, and how much bandwidth was used on individual connections.

Ntop do something special for every ntop user. that given below.

•             Sort network traffic according to many protocols

•             Show network traffic sorted according to various criteria

•             Display traffic statistics

•             Store on disk persistent traffic statistics in RRD format

•             Identify the indentity (e.g. email address) of computer users

•             Passively (i.e. without sending probe packets) identify the host OS

•             Show IP traffic distribution among the various protocols

•             Analyse IP traffic and sort it according to the source/destination

•             Display IP Traffic Subnet matrix (who’s talking to who?)

•             Report IP protocol usage sorted by protocol type

•             Act as a NetFlow /sFlow collector for flows generated by routers (e.g. Cisco and Juniper) or switches (e.g. Foundry Networks)

•             Produce RMON-like network traffic statistics