Monitoring Throughput on a Ubiquiti Network

[JonathanEngr]

I've been trying to find a free program to monitor the total incoming and outgoing traffic in mbps from my Ubiquiti network. Several of my neighbors and I leased a line of fiber for distribution from a local system, and we are leasing a 100 mbps/100 mbps bandwidth currently. I would like to monitor/log the throughput of really just one IP address to see how many times our combined usage tops out at 100 mbps, or if these is even happening. This will allow me to know when it's time to upgrade our service to 200 mbps/200 mbps and so-on. Ubiquiti has their UNMS system, but it seems to create averages. For instance, I maxed out the system speed doing a few downloads, and one very large download overnight. Ubiquiti's UNMS only showed a peak rate of 30 mbps when I know it was much higher.

My question is would Cacti be a good tool for this? I can connect via command line UNMS to my router, and specify the fiber port. I assume Cacti can be set up for this? Does it log the data onto my local computer allowing me to display it and/or put it into a spreadsheet? I currently have Solarwinds free Real Time Bandwidth Monitor installed and connected via UNMS, and it works perfectly. However, as far as I know, it doesn't actually log the information. Thanks for any suggestions/recommendations you can give me.

[cigamit]

You should be able to enable SNMP on the device, and then Cacti can monitor the WAN interface without any issues.

[JonathanEngr]

Thanks! I believe that's what I did to access the device with solarwinds. Question--I haven't tried to install Cacti yet--it seems it needs a virtual OS? I saw an image I can download that has virtualbox somewhat setup. Is it fairly straightforward from there? Will it require dual boot, or does it run within Windows?

[bmfmancini]

you can just run Cacti in a VM no dual booting needed

We have tutorials on the youtube channel and docs to walk you through most things you would need

Check out the Youtube channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6ROmU ... dHWzvGSY1w

[cigamit]

For what you are wanting to do, you can also run it on a Raspberry Pi

[JonathanEngr]

The Raspberry Pi idea did cross my mind, but I would like something on my primary PC just for ease of use. Regarding running it in a VM, I assume the software logs this information? That's the primary component I'm looking for. If it does, can I easily view the data on a graph within Cacti, and is the data in a numerical format that could be loaded and sorted in a spreadsheet? Thanks!!