So now that Comcast has implemented the 250gig a month limit I have been trying to come up with a solution to monitor my bandwidth usage and track it from month to month. Currently I am running a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 router with third party firmware from DD-WRT.

 

Because I am running DD-WRT it now allows me to capture SNMP packets and use that to monitor my traffic. In the past I’ve used simple tools like SNMP Traffic Grapher (STG). I soon found out that STG wouldn’t cut it for what I needed and started looking around for something more robust and something that would save my data month to month.

 

I started looking around and found Cacti as well as MRTG, both were great options but a little hard to get up and running for a Windows Zealot like myself. After digging around some more I found a .exe self installer that someone put together on the Cacti forums and from there it was simple as double clicking, following a few instructions and I was up and running with Cacti on my WHS box.

 

Here is the Windows stand alone installer for Cacti: http://forums.cacti.net/about14946.html

The installer does everything you need to get it up and running, all you need to do, is download it, transfer it to your WHS box, then RDP into your WHS box and double click and install. The installer finds out that you already have IIS installed and up and running on your WHS box, so its a really easy, straight forward install.

 

Right now I have it installed, configured and pointed to my DD-WRT router with SNMP enabled, and monitoring my internet traffic that is going through my router, I now just wish I had a way to send me a notification if I were getting close to the 250gig a month cap. Like have it alert me via email if I were to get within 90% of the 250gig cap, but for now I have at least got it monitoring my traffic and logging it, which was half the battle.

 

- Josh