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WhatToThink

I need a network monitoring tool that preferably runs on windows. All I really need it do is show a list of ip address which are connected to the network and record how much bandwidth they use. I have been looking for some time and can't find anything. Also, it needs to be free...yeah thats a big one. If anyone knows of anything I would be grateful.

Echo

Switched networks don't work like that. You'd need to route all the traffic through the computer.

Seeks

The closest thing I can think of is netmeter, but I don't think it does the "separate ip" thing. Just however much that specific PC is using. I could be wrong, though.

Phyphor

I don't know of anything that would record bandwidth like you want, but you could probably do something kinda close with Wireshark.

Like Echo said though on most networks you won't see all the traffic. You *could* get an unswitched hub and connect this monitoring PC, your modem/router and your main cable to the rest of the network to it, that would let you see everything that goes across

stigweard

Echo wrote: »

Switched networks don't work like that. You'd need to route all the traffic through the computer.

This. There isn't much good and free Windows software either. If you had the inclination, time and a bit of old hardware, there are free linux solutions that can do what you want. You could even use iftop in dd-wrt on a newer, firmware upgradable, router.

edit: This looks promising. There is a windows binary. You would still have to pipe all traffic through the machine or you would only see portions of what is going on.

Apothe0sis

BandwidthD is pretty ok, ntop is much more feature rich, but I don't recall whether there's a way to install that on windows without resorting to cygwin or something. It's almost certainly not worth it though, because it's unlikely that your current infrastructure will support it in any case.

But unless you can route everything through the computer with the bandwidth you're rather out of luck on consumer network hardware (you don't want an unswitched hub, because they're not very efficient and flow capable routers and commercial switches which support such things are expensive).

The easiest thing you could do is get a really cheap old machine, put pfSense on it, activate the ntop plugin and whack a second network card in it. Then route everything from your main network through one network card and out into the internet through the other.

Then will feel like a real network admin. (I am currently in the process of doing something similar to this, but I'm planning on virtualising instead of putting in an extra machine).

I am reasonably sure that there are bandwidth counting tools that you could install on each machine and then maybe hack something up to a file or something, which you could then analyse from a central point. This has the advantages of not requiring any new hardware or changes to your network. But has the disadvantages of not being easy to manage, I don't know anything that does this off the top of my head and you've got a lot of coding ahead of you to make it work that way.