See the Win32::PerfLib module (it comes as standard with ActiveState distributions). It gives you access to some 240+ counters (XP, other versions vary). The API is not the easiest in the world to use, but the following program lists all the counters + a textual description of what they are. See the module POD for further info;

Thanks a lot, I'll take a look at this.

Best regards,


---
Er Galvão Abbott
www.galvao.eti.br
Porto Alegre Perl Mongers

Windows has performance counters that can be used to track this, and even graph it. Head to Administrative Tools in the Control Panel and select Performance. you can see it charted in real time in System Monitor (right-click, Add Counter, ...) or log it using Counter Logs (right-click, New Log Settings, ...). I think there's a way to graph logs, but I didn't look for it since you wanted to use perl.

When logging, you have the option of starting a new file and/or having a program automatically launched every X time units. You could use this to lauch a perl script to analyse the logs regularly. (Maybe it passes the log name as an arg?? Maybe only if you specify %1??).

There a few file formats available (binary, CSV, TSV, binary circlular). Binary appears to be a list of packed timestamped samples preceeded with a header. You might be able to find some info on it if you search, or it should be pretty easy to deduce enough to use it. Or you could simply use CSV, which looks as follow:

"(PDH-CSV 4.0) (Eastern Daylight Time)(240)","\Network Interface(D-Lin
+k DFE-530TX PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter)\Bytes Total/sec"
"09/07/2004 16:55:52.920","197.72459904908843"
"09/07/2004 16:56:07.922","8463.4043604248636"
"09/07/2004 16:56:22.924","3580.6992148876643"
"09/07/2004 16:56:37.926","3465.1013327365235"
"09/07/2004 16:56:52.928","3496.5035571311519"
"09/07/2004 16:57:07.930","3578.1525481840044"
[download]

(This should give a hint as to the fields in the bin format, btw)

Any decent firewall has a userland interface program which spits out statistics, in text format. Work your magic on processing that output. Then you can use something like GD to make pretty graphs. If you're using PF, merlyn even wrote an excellent column on how to do exactly what you want.

Thanks, but sadly seems that it's not ZoneAlarm's case...

I forgot to say that I'm on Windows here...

Regards,


my ($author_nickname, $author_email) = ("DaWolf","erabbott\@terra.com.br") if ($author_name eq "Er Galvão Abbott");

This node, which I found by doing a title search for "bandwidth usage", mentions SNMP, which you may be able to use.

Ouch. Well, I did mention decent ...:)

ZoneAlarm log files can be parsed but you probably don't want to do that to measure bandwidth. I used to have a script that parsed them. (It showed various things like the different ports that were probed at the various times of the day.)

I like your suggestion, it's simple and looks effective.

Thanks, barathbr, I'll give it a try.


---
Er Galvão Abbott
www.galvao.eti.br
Porto Alegre Perl Mongers