Data usage monitoring

Soldato
Joined
1 Jul 2007
Posts
5,392
Does anyone know of any free software that would monitor data usage on a small network?
It's a three router network. 4G router supplying two separate TP-links.

Ideally it can be as simple as;

Device name
IP
MAC
Data used (in GB)

Truthfully not even sure if such a thing would exist. There's a laptop running 24/7 that it could be set up on.
 
Associate
Joined
30 Aug 2018
Posts
2,483
Does anyone know of any free software that would monitor data usage on a small network?
It's a three router network. 4G router supplying two separate TP-links.

Ideally it can be as simple as;

Device name
IP
MAC
Data used (in GB)

Truthfully not even sure if such a thing would exist. There's a laptop running 24/7 that it could be set up on.
You're talking about seeing which devices are using what data?

It can be done but i believe it would need to be done by the router.

You can install monitoring software onto the individual devices but that would be OS specific and would only monitor the device it is installed on.

EDIT: If you could put the 3 router into modem mode and connect it to another router like a device using dd-wrt (or other suitable software) that would do what you want. Assuming the router you own can't already do it.
 
Last edited:
Associate
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27 Jun 2008
Posts
1,536
You can't install something on a client (the laptop) that will be able to monitor the network usage of other clients, only it's own traffic. You'd need something that can monitor traffic at the "three router" level. So your options are individually monitor each device which isn't practical or setup a router between the three modem and clients running something with data monitoring capabilities. Most £100> routers likely have these abilities as does anything running pfsense.
 
Soldato
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You can't install something on a client (the laptop) that will be able to monitor the network usage of other clients, only it's own traffic.

That's not strictly true. If the switches support port mirroring (or span in Cisco speak) then all traffic going to that switch can be duplicated and sent out of another port. In this case you'd mirror the uplink from the switch to the router.
 

SMN

SMN

Soldato
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That's not strictly true. If the switches support port mirroring (or span in Cisco speak) then all traffic going to that switch can be duplicated and sent out of another port. In this case you'd mirror the uplink from the switch to the router.
This. If you can span or port mirror your traffic off to a box, you can then run something like nTop, etc to profile the traffic.
 
Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
26,053
Can your Three router support static routes, or a bridge mode? Alternatively, if you aren't fussed about another level of NAT then you can insert something in between your Three router and the rest of your network that can do flow reporting into a tool such as PRTG.
 
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