can anyone advise I have a dedicated server and am monitoring the total bandwidth through the netowk card.

can anyone recommend some good software that will allow me to monitor traffic per domain via http/ftp and email.

I just want the ability to check so that accounts do not go over allocated bandwidth.

Thanks

Mark

I'm not sure this will do it:
http://www.analog.cx/intro.html

But if not, Gary (of www-hosting) passed my info to someone who offers what I think you want. The cost was $250, if interested, shoot me an email and I'll forward you the message I received.

We currently use livestats to provide info for most sites( not all sites as we charge the customer) all I really want is the ability to report on how much datatransfer each domain on the server is using.

The problem is we offer 1GB bandwidth per domain hosted but at the moment I have now way of reporting on this.

Mark

<<ADMIN EDIT>> Have you heard of PLESK? Its an awesome online control panel that alows you to view bandwidth current space thank type of thing and it will even email it to your email. So its worth checking out http://www.plesk.com <<ADMIN EDIT>>Please review the forum rules (http://www.webhostlink.com/index.php?action=forum-rules)<</ADMIN EDIT>>

[Edited by Chicken on 01-15-2001 at 01:37 PM]

Yes but plesk only works on linux I need someting for NT

Well I just noticed you said NT, but will post this anyway for those using Apache.

http://www.snert.com/Software/mod_throttle/

This module does what he needs (too bad he's using NT), plus can throttle based off ip's, virtual hosts, directories, etc. It has a number of throttle methods as well. Yeah and it's free also.

Yes, Chicken is right. The url to their website is: http://www.mermaidconsulting.com

There isn't anything on their site that mentions the Bandwidth Monitor, but its around $250.00, the installation is included in the price and they are coming out with a v2.0 and it looks pretty promising. It will even email you if a site gets to their limit of whatever you allocated.

We have been using the monitor for quite a while, the price is steep, but its pretty much the only one of its kind, unless you search around the net and create something yourself.

With the RaQ's they set it so it monitors the sites logs, which is great because if you have alot of sites on a shared ip, monitoring the IP address would be no good...

mod_throttle limits bandwidth usage, not maximum amount of transfer in GB.
Which is better?
mod throttle
http://www.snert.com/Software/mod_throttle/

or

mod_bandwidth
http://www.cohprog.com/mod_bandwidth.html


It also looks like RobertW wants to limit transfer in GB without analyzing apache log files, is there a way?

Actually mod throttle can do just that.

ThrottlePolicy Volume 10G 30d

This would limit accounts to 10 gigs a month(30 days) and then choke down the account. Instead of 'Volume', you can use 'Document' which doesnt throttle html or images. Course, you could either kill, or you could slow it down using 'speed' policy.


Document
Excluding requests for HTML page elements such as images and style sheets, impose a limit on the number of requests per period. When this limit is exceeded all further requests are refused, until the elapsed time exceeds the period length, at which point the elapsed time and the counters are reset. Note that the requests (hits) column of the throttle status display does not include the requests for page elements.

Volume
Impose a limit on the volume (kbytes sent) per period. When this limit is exceeded all further requests are refused, until the end of the period at which point the elapsed time and counters are reset.

Speed
Impose a limit on the volume (kbytes sent) per period, which when exceeded the request incurs a calculated delay penalty or is refused.


A better way may be to figure out how many minutes or hours there are in 30 days, spread out the bandwidth limit across that (in this case 10 gigs), that way an account gets limitedt by the minute or hour, and not use up all their allowed bandwidth in the first week. Still, another way is to limit how much can be transfered within so much time, and then instead of shutting them down, choke the connection. Mod throttle gives you a LOT more options on how to do it than mod bandwidth does.

Then again, If it works, I guess you could use a combo of both. That way you throttle monthly amount as well as hourly amount....I havent tried it, but I would bet mod throttle could do this as well. I just installed it the other day, so am not a pro on it. I have messed with it only a little and havent really watched it, so cant say how well it works yet.

On a web hosting business, 99% of the traffic will be generated by your web server.

Find a log analyzer for NT, and you will have the amount of transfer per months.

I personally wouldn't use mod_throttle to choke up a site... after all, its way better to charge for extra transfer than kill a site going a bit over.

>>I personally wouldn't use mod_throttle to choke up a site... after all, its way better to charge for extra transfer than kill a site going a bit over.<<


Another nice feature of mod_throttle is that you don't have to choke down the site if you don't want to. Just set a policy for the domains/users/direcotries with no limit and just use mod_throttle to monitor usage. Then bill 'em for it.

"mod_throttle to monitor usage. Then bill 'em for it."

Which directive in mod_throttle do you use to record the amount of usage (in MB or GB) ?

Originally posted by PepsiCoke
There isn't anything on their site that mentions the Bandwidth Monitor, but its around $250.00, the installation is included in the price and they are coming out with a v2.0 and it looks pretty promising. It will even email you if a site gets to their limit of whatever you allocated.

This sounds fantastic. And, frankly, the price is quite acceptable (the amount you save by not having customers exceeding their bandwidth limit would more than cover the cost of the program, I would think - if it didn't you probably don't have enough customers to need to worry about bandwidth usage yet).

Anyway, does this program run on NT? As you said I found no info on the web site about it, so I'd be curious to know any more of the technical specs you could provide. Please feel free to e-mail me privately about it if you'd rather.

Thanks,

Jason

If you just want to see what usage is... say for a VirtualHost...

<IfModule mod_throttle.c>
ThrottlePolicy None 0G 30d
</IfModule>

within the VirtualHost container will do it. (reset every 30 days)

ThrottlePolicy Volume 5G 30d

will limit that virtual host to 5 Gigs transfer in 30 days, but will not limit bandwidth until the volume is reached, at which point it cuts them off until they pay you more money... :)

HTH

I'm still confused
how using mod_throttle can I measure how many GB a virtualhost used in a specific time period?

If you install mod_throttle correctly, and follow the instructions on their site, you will something similar to the following in your httpd.conf file.

<IfModule mod_throttle.c>

<Location /throttle-status>
SetHandler throttle-status
</Location>

<Location /throttle-me>
SetHandler throttle-me
</Location>

<Location /~*/throttle-me>
SetHandler throttle-me
</Location>

</IfModule>


Then in the VirtualHost container/directive for the VirtualHost(s) you want to monitor you can put something like the following.

<VirtualHost 23.33.43.53>

<IfModule mod_throttle.c>
ThrottlePolicy none
</IfModule>

ServerName domainiwanttomonitor.com
ServerAdministrator webmaster@domainiwanttomonitor.com

more stuff here...
</VirtualHost>

Then to see how many KB of transfer the virtual host has transferred you go to your main domain for the server and add the throttle-status on the end...

http://mainserver.com/throttle-status

and you will get a nice display showing you the statistics for that virtual domain and any other virtual domain in which you have set a throttle policy.

The line throttle-policy none defaults to displaying KBs of transfer in a 4 week period I believe. By adding your own criteria, you can specify other statistical units.

Replacing the line "Throttle-policy none" with the following one,

ThrottlePolicy Volume 5G 30d

you can actually limit the transfer of a single VirtualHost to 5 gigs of transfer in 30 days, and the status results page will show the KBs transferred in the current 30 days, the percentage of allowed transfer that has taken place so far, the number of requests for transfer that have been denied due to this policy, and several other things.

correct, heres an url of an example of a domain not in use for now..

http://stormwebs.com/throttle-me
This is the url you would give the account holder for them to check when they want. These accounts are limited to 3 gigs per month, so instead of limiting monthly, I limited it to 10 megs per day.

You can have your own url that shows all hosted domains. I havent added all domains yet, but am working on it (still updating and adding to existing domains)

As I said, I just installed this, so dont know yet if it actually does the job...I am still playing with the configs, but this should give you all a general idea.

thanks for info.
Like the apache server-status, I assume http://stormwebs.com/throttle-me shows usage for all domains and does not show usage only for the domain it is on.

What about measuring FTP traffic? (say some users want anonymous ftp for file downloads)
I was concidering

NTOP
http://www-serra.unipi.it/~ntop/ntop.html

and

Bandmin
http://www.bandmin.org

Does anyone know any software that will allow to monitor usage per IP on Linux?



[Edited by energy on 01-18-2001 at 12:48 AM]

http://stormwebs.com/throttle-me shows for just that domain, http://stormwebs.com/throttle-status shows for all domains subject to limitation. throttle-status is the default name, but I believe you can have it whatever you want so that domain.com/whatever. You can also set a refresh code, I have it defaulting to 200 seconds, but you can override it. For 5 seconds for example...

http://stormwebs.com/throttle-me?refresh=5

hm
"These accounts are limited to 3 gigs per month, so instead of limiting monthly, I limited it to 10 megs per day."
isn't it suposed to be 100 mb per day?

yeah, sorry...I have it set at 10 right now to if it works. I forgot to say that, but later that will be 100 to throttle the total monthly.

I am having one heck of a time with it though. See, worldzone.net is a free host and I want to throttle each account to 3 gigs per month.

for example, an account on wz would be similar to worldzone.net/catagory/username

The username is what I want to throttle. (/*/username) but it keeps throttling the whole danged domain...maybe I'm just missing it in their instruction since they are a bit vague on it. Anyone have an idea of how to do it?

A throttle on a user will throttle all files owned by that user, and should not affect files not owned by the user.

The "ThrottleUser user" policy should also be in the main server configuration and not in a VirtualHost...

Have you tried throttling by Directory?

<Directory /path/to/users/directory>
ThrottlePolicy .....
</Directory>


You might also look at mod_bandwidth and see if it will meet your requirements.

Well personally we install MRTG for all of our dedicated customers. You can see what it looks like at

http://www.nethosters.com/netstats/ - just click on the graph

It is very easy to install it (if you are pretty good with UNIX). Cricket is also another great program to run. It does basically the same exact thing but also monitors just about everything else also (processes running, apache bandwidth, ftp bandwidth etc etc).



Thanks,


James R. Clark II
Nethosters Inc.
http://www.nethosters.com

After all these posts I still can't find anything to monitor indvidual bandwidth for sites on the server.

Does anyone know of any software to monitor bandwidth used per domain for Windows 2000