How to measure cloud incoming and outgoing bandwidth?

Question

I am renting a Rackspace cloud instance now and I want to measure the incoming and outgoing bandwidth.

When a normal request comes for a page - what is the bandwidth consumed and when a normal page is delivered to the browser from the server instance .. how much is the bandwidth consumed ?

I want to know more about this calculation.I am a beginner at this. please help

Answer 1

There are a few different methods to measure bandwidth over time. If you want something graphical and easy to read, you might want to look at ntop:

• http://www.ntop.org/news.php

You can also track bandwidth with iptables pretty easily. You'll just need to set up some ACCEPT rules and then print the iptables rules to see the bandwidth add up. I wrote up a post about this a while back:

• http://rackerhacker.com/2007/02/11/measuring-raw-shell-bandwidth/

If you want to just check a few page loads or look at your instantaneous bandwidth usage, you can also use bwm-ng, iftop, and jnettop.