How to monitor internet usage on lan network

[ryanpaul04]

Greetings. I need help regarding on how to monitor internet usage on every computer in our office. Is there any software that can solve my problem?

 

[Sheepykins]

how big an office are we talking? undoubtedly you're going to have a router, routers log activity, just use your credentials to get into the router and you can see who accessed what

 

[ryanpaul04]

approximately we have about 25 computers, and we are using linksys router. thanks for the reply.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Consumer grade routers, and most routers don't log actual amounts of bandwidth used by each device. You will need a proxy server or something similar and force users to go through that, which you can setup a way to log bandwidth/connections and everything else.

 

[ryanpaul04]

i see. what proxy server can you suggest to me? actually i'm newbie on using a proxy server on a lan network.

 

[Sheepykins]

every consumer grade netgear router and linksys router i've had since 2008 has logging,

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Mine has logs, but not bandwidth logs, please re-read what I said.

Most people don't care about logs unless they are trying to find which machine/user is using abnormal amounts of traffic. Seeing where they connect does not help in such instances. -.-

Now, he has 25 computers on the network, I have a SINGLE PC causing my router to log hundreds of connections at one time. Now, here is the kicker, it fills up the highly limited table my router offers. Yes I can see that PC making HUNDREDS of connections, but is that single PC using up all the bandwidth? It actually isn't there is another one on my network that has a single connection and it's using nearly all my available bandwidth.

There ya go, that is the typical "log" routers employ, they very rarely ever store detailed information over long periods of time, and calculate total bandwidth used per machine at the same time.

BTW, that entire log file is only 3 minutes long, and it has the "log" maxed, so it's erasing the oldest records so it can store more.

 

[Sheepykins]

i stand corrected and embarrased

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

What he can do is build a router using IPCop, and install NetMeter addons for it. I haven't done it, but plan on doing so here very soon due to my ISP caps, and the need to log my network traffic, but I haven't actually found anything useful to monitor individual computer bandwidth usage using a single PC to monitor it all.

 

[ryanpaul04]

@c0rr0sive: I see, that makes us two on finding a system that can monitor internet usage on multiple computers in a single pc.