Router Traffic Plotter

I wanted to plot a 24 hour network throughput time-series of my ASUS router and there was no built in facilty provided by the firmware. I also didn't want to flash a custom firmware for this feature. So I decided to create my own logger.

Prerequisites

1. Router must support a POSIX shell
2. Should be able to ssh into it
3. Should support cut, awk and sed

Installing the logger

• Place config and monitor.sh in your router in the same directory. Ideally, you should place it in such a partition which has enough space to store atleast 2 log file dumps.
• Change the DUMP_ARCHIVE directory present in config. This dictates where the log files will be written.
• Change the interface list as per your router setup. Check interface list using ifconfig or ip a.

Starting the logger

Start the process using nohup or screen.

nohup monitor.sh

Note - If your router does not support nohup or similar applications, you need to have another device which can login to the router and run the script. Unfortunately, your secondary device needs to be on.

Since my ASUS router does not have ssh-keygen, I could not automate the dumping of log files. You can also tell your secondary device to pull the log file right after the router dumps the log. Installing something like OpenWrt alleviates the problem.

Plotting the data

You need to have matplotlib Python package. You can run this on your own machine, once the data has been collected. To plot, run the command

./plot.py <filename> -1 -1

To-do

• Seperate config file
• Automate dumping of log files