Mikrotik bandwidth monitor. MikroTik Bandwidth Test MikroTik Speed Test

Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG)¶

MRTG generates traffic graphs for your SNMP-enabled router. If your router does not support SNMP, take a look at MikroTik devices, which offer enterprise-grade routers at consumer prices.

MRTG is pre-installed in NEMS Linux 1.6 and is available in NEMS Linux 1.3.x-1.5.x by way of a NEMS Update.

MikroTik¶

To enable SNMP on MikroTik RouterOS devices:

If desired, you can add your contact name and location to your SNMP Trap in the MikroTik WebFig / WinBox under IP → SNMP.

Configuration¶

In time, MRTG configuration will become part of NEMS SST. For the time being, a command must be entered in your NEMS Linux terminal in order to connect MRTG to your router:

Simply enter your router’s IP address and your trap community name when prompted, and the script will generate your MRTG config, activate it, and provide you with all links for detected SNMP sources on your router.

Please Note: mrtgsetup only supports the default public trap community at this time.

Check Command¶

NEMS Linux includes check_mrtgtraf_nems. This is a custom wrapper for check_mrtgtraf.py which is itself a reworking of check_mrtgtraf.

You must first run mrtgsetup, otherwise the check command will have no data to work with.

Beyond the standard graphs that MRTG provides, you may also add the check_mrtgtraf_nems check command to your SNMP-capable router/switch host(s) and monitor any or all of their ports. For example, to monitor the Internet bandwidth usage, you can add a check command to monitor your WAN port. Then, if you want to monitor the bandwidth usage for a specific Ethernet port (for example, an employee or server who is known to use a lot of bandwidth), you can do so by adding a second check command to that host which targets the Ethernet port that user is connected to. This can also be handy for zoned networks where, for example, you may want to monitor the bandwidth usage of specific departments by connecting their uplink to a specific port on your monitored device. You may also use this to monitor the amount of bandwidth being consumed by users on your guest Wi-Fi, and then notify the admin if the set thresholds are exceeded.

Check Command Arguments¶

Add the check_mrtgtraf_nems check command to your router host in NEMS NConf, using the following arguments:

• Port. This is the number associated with the SNMP. This will not correspond with traditional conventions, but rather is generated by the SNMP OID. You can find the number on the corresponding MRTG page following the header “Traffic Analysis for”. The number corresponds to the port to use for check_mrtgtraf_nems. You can find the MRTG graphs at https://nems.local/mrtg/
• Multiplier. What measurement you’d like to use for your thresholds. Available options are gb, mb or kb.
• Warn Up / Warn Down / Critical Up / Critical Down. Set your thresholds. Can be a positive floating point number or integer.

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MikroTik Bandwidth Test [MikroTik Speed Test]

A step-by-step guide in order to test the bandwidth using MikroTik.

List of content you will read in this article:

Your network’s bandwidth is crucial to connection speed and quality. Today we will provide you with everything you need to know about the MikroTik Bandwidth test and a small comparison between it and other network measurements such as the MikroTik speed test and latency. Following it is a short tutorial on how to perform a bandwidth test in Mikrotik RouterOS.

What is Bandwidth?

In technical terms, bandwidth is the transmission capacity of a network connection. It plays an important role in determining the quality and speed of a network or internet connection. In layman’s terms, it is the volume of data that can be transmitted at once over a connection.

Think of it as an intercity highway, where bandwidth is the number of lanes the road has. While not directly affecting the speed at which cars (data packets) can travel through it, when there is traffic, more cars will make it to the destination at the same time.

There are multiple different ways in which bandwidth could be measured: calculation of current data flow, calculation of maximum data flow, typical flow, or good flow.

In the older days of technology, bandwidth used to be measured in bps, or bits per second, however, in modern times, metric prefixes are typically attached to the front as contemporary networks have much higher bandwidth. Nowadays, we hear bandwidth being denoted in Mbps, (i.e., megabits per second), Gbps (i.e., gigabits per second), or sometimes even Tbps (i.e., terabits per second).

Bandwidth vs. Speed

Bandwidth is how much information you can receive every second, while speed is how fast that information is received or downloaded. Let’s compare it to filling a bathtub. If the bathtub faucet has a wide opening, more water can flow at a faster rate than if the pipe was narrower. Think of the water as the bandwidth and the rate at which the water flows as the speed.

Bandwidth vs. Latency

Latency is sometimes referred to as delay or ping rate. It’s the lag you experience while waiting for something to load. If bandwidth is the amount of information sent per second, latency is the amount of time it takes that information to get from its source to you.

Bandwidth vs. Throughput

Throughput is how much information actually gets delivered in a certain amount of time. So if bandwidth is the max amount of data, throughput is how much of that data makes it to its destination – taking latency, network speed, packet loss, and other factors into account.

What is Mikrotik?

MikroTik RouterOS is the operating system of MikroTik RouterBoard hardware. It can also be installed on a PC and will turn it into a router with all the necessary features. routing, firewall, bandwidth management, wireless access point, backhaul link, hotspot gateway, VPN server, and more.

RouterOS is a stand-alone operating system based on the Linux v2.6 kernel, and our goal here at MikroTik is to provide all these features with a quick and simple installation and an easy-to-use interface. You can try RouterOS today, go to www.mikrotik.com and download the installation CD image. The free trial provides all of the features with no limitations.

Mikrotik Bandwidth Test Tool

In MikroTik devices, you can test the bandwidth to where you are linked. To test and ensure that the bandwidth is clear and reliable, follow the steps outlined below to run the bandwidth test.

After logging to MikroTik Server, go to the tools Bandwidth test menu. In the newly-opened window you will see some options:

• Test To: Destination IP address that you want to see the bandwidth with.
• Protocol: select the test protocol such as UDP and TCP.
• Direction: select send or receive bandwidth test
• User and pass: if the destination node has a username and password, enter the fields.

Fill out the required fields and click on Start.

Conclusion

We hope that this detailed blog helped you expand your knowledge on the Mikrotik bandwidth test, Mikrotik connection speed test, latency, and throughput. We also included a small introduction about Mikrotik RouterOS and a short tutorial on how to carry out bandwidth testing on it. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comment section below.

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Monitor your Mikrotik/RouterOS device with Logstail.com!

MikroTik routers are combining a powerful operating system (RouterOS) with low-cost prices. With Logstail.com and its advanced features, we will visualize our MikroTik logs and analyze our network and security performance and get instant email alerts alongside with encriched reports. The importance of using log management software is highlighted in this article from our blog. In the few following steps we will analyze our logs on the platform, but also benefit from the numerous features of Logstail.

• Create a new logging action
• Configure MikroTik logging rules to specify which logs to send to Logstail.com
• Validate our logs.
• Add Mikrotik Graphs/Dashboards
• Configure Email Alerting
• Configure Reporting
• View Logstail’s Mikrotik Insights (using Machine Learning)
• Full encryption in Transit

Step 1. Create a new logging action

In the first step, we have to sign-up for a new Logstail.com account here or login to an existing one. Then, on RouterOS we should create a new logging action under System. Logging. Actions that will send log data to Logstail.com.

To do so we should press “Add New” and add the following information to the relevant fields: Name “SendLogstail” (or any other name), Remote Address: “95.216.177.82” and Remote Port: “35625”.

If we choose to configure with terminal, then this is the command we should execute:

action add bsd. syslog = no name = SendLogstail remote = 95.216.177.82 remote. port = 35625 src. address = 0.0.0.0 syslog. facility = daemon syslog. severity = auto syslog. time. format = bsd. syslog target = remote

Step 2. Configure MikroTik logging rules to specify which logs to send to Logstail.com

In the second step, we will develop some rules on MikroTik to send specific data to our Logstail.com stack.

1st rule: Send Firewall logs

The first rule is sending firewall messages, logs, or firewall events to Logstail.com. We configure a new rule which uses the action we created on the previous step, named “SendLogstail”. This new rule is going to send all messages that fall into the firewall topic from “firewall”. Logstail.com requires your unique “Stack token”, which can be copied from our main dashboard, to be added as a prefix in order to be able to successfully parse our logs. This token can be found here.

In the Prefix field, we should also add the word “mikrotik” after our “User Token” so as our logs to be distinguished from logs coming from other apps (ex. Apache, Nginx e.t.c.). After the word “mikrotik” we have to specify a “DeviceId” e.g. “OurRouter” or “Router_1” in order to distinguish this MikroTik Router logs from other Mikrotik Routers that we are going to add later.

2nd Rule: Enable Firewall to log and drop

In the next action, we enable logging on our MikroTik firewall. If we have a set of firewall filter rules already on our Mikrotik, we can just simply enable logging. This procedure can be done in Action Tab of any firewall rule by selecting Log checkbox.

3rd Rule: Monitor Routers Health

In order to monitor RouterOS and health and other useful parameters (ex. arp list and firewall connections, Wireless Hotspot Statistics), we have to create a scheduled task. Under System- Scheduler- Add New and name it “logstail” (or any name OS your choice). Then we copy and paste the following commands into the scheduler task:

System health logs are going to be generated via “error” log messages so we need to add a rule to send scheduler’s generated logs.

add action = logstail disabled = no prefix = OurUserToken mikrotik DeviceID topics = error. ! script

4th Rule: DNS Requests

In this last step, we will configure MikroTik to send DNS related logs to Logstail.com, so as to be able to monitor what our local users visit more. To do so we should add this logging rule to log DNS requests and replies:

add action = logstail disabled = no prefix = OurUserToken mikrotik DeviceID topics = dns. ! packet

5th Rule: Monitor your CapsMan

If they exist in your network Controlled Access Points (CAP) you can monitor your Controlled Access Point system Manager (CAPsMAN) which allows centralization of wireless network management. Logstail.com offers you a nice graph called HeatMap. With this, you can monitor the signal strengths of your connected users. In addition, you can monitor the utilization of each CAP. To do so you only have to enable CapsMan logging.

6th Rule: IP Accounting Information

To Monitor IP Accounting Information and get the most out of it you should go to IP-Accounting and Enable Accounting. (only for RouterOS6 and below)

The final image of the logging rules will be like this:

Step 3. Logs validation on Logstail Discover

If we followed the previous steps, we should now be able to validate our logs on Logstail.com main page. We can now go to the Analytics submenu called Discover and see our logs coming in.

Step 4. Adding Apps (Prebuilt Dashboards)

At this step, we can add some Logstail.com community prebuilt Dashboards and Visualizations that will definitely add value to our logs and will help us efficiently analyze them and discover hidden values. To add prebuilt Dashboards, go to Apps tab and install one or more Prebuilt Dashboards. Then you can access these Dashboards from the Analytics submenu called Dashboards.

Available MikroTik Dashboards

MikroTik – Firewall General Overview Dashboard

MikroTik – All-in-one Dashboard

MikroTik – Famous sites Dashboard

MikroTik – Attack on main ports Dashboard

Step 5. Alerting

Our alerting feature enables you or your team to be notified about situations that may cause problems to your devices or generally your infrastructure. Don’t forget that now you have three (3) options to be alerted, Slack, Webhook and Email! You can find more details about how to setup alerting here!

Step 6. Reporting

Reporting is a must today. Every entity, from the smallest organization to a big corporation needs metrics to assess the security posture of the company. That’s why our reporting feature is here to solve problems by providing the ability to create PNG, PDF, or CSV reports. You now have two choices, to create ad hoc reports or by definition (eg. predefined intervals). Reporting can also be used to export your data and store them locally.

Our detailed articles can solve any questions that may arise!

Step 7. Insights (Machine Learning)

Machine Learning is here to help, especially when we deal with vast amounts of data like log files! We now offer Anomaly Detection through the Insights feature. Insights is a powerful AI-Powered plugin. It integrates the Anomaly detection tool which is another important capability that can be leveraged through Logstail Platform. Anomaly detection involves identifying patterns or data points that deviate significantly from the norm, which may indicate unusual or potential problematic activity. It provides the user with data visualizations, such as charts and graphs. These visualizations are helpful in identifying patterns and trends that may not be immediately apparent through simple data analysis. The insights plugin is functioning in real time analyzing new ingested logs, performing predictive analytics to identify issues before that occur and automatic alerting the user in combination with the Alerting Plugin. You can find more details about how to setup anomaly detectors here!

Step 8. Full encryption in Transit (optionally)

Encryption in transit is essential to protect against eavesdroppers and malicious users that want to perform Man-in-the-Middle attacks. With this feature, you can stop worrying when your logs are traveling to Logstail platform.

The logs are gathered and transmitted securely to Logstail Server (TLS encryption) by a docker container hosted in your premises.

To deploy the container you just have to install Docker in a system which is accessible from your MikroTik devices and run the following script:

Monitor, trace, and analyze network traffic data all at once

Identifying the root cause of a slow network depends on monitoring both network device performance and network traffic. SolarWinds Bandwidth Analyzer Pack (BAP) is a network traffic monitor combining the best-in-class features of Network Performance Monitor (NPM) and NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA).

With BAP, you can also measure network traffic across your network by drilling down on bandwidth and packet path metrics. This makes it easy to detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance issues. BAP is designed to make it easy to trace network traffic on a single interface by leveraging a customizable, all-in-one view. Spot issues with graphs and histograms offering broad views and key details. In addition, BAP offers tools designed to help you improve wireless coverage and identify dead zones.

Identify major users of network bandwidth

Do you know what or who is using your network bandwidth? Understanding bandwidth usage is key to maintaining fast network speeds. Before you buy more bandwidth as soon as users start complaining that the network is slow or the internet is down, you need to first identify who the network top talkers are. SolarWinds BAP is designed to help you find the top network talkers using up your bandwidth. With this information, you can resolve bandwidth bottlenecks to ensure better network performance.

SolarWinds Bandwidth Analyzer Pack is a network traffic monitor solution leveraging the SNMP monitoring, NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow, NetStream, and IPFIX data built into most routers. With these metrics, you can identify the users, applications, and protocols consuming your bandwidth, so you can shut down those bandwidth-hogging users and apps before spending money on resources you don’t need.

Improve your network traffic control measures

You need to make sure the most important applications for your business are getting bandwidth priority. This is particularly important if your business relies on VoIP, e-commerce, or other critical Cloud-based applications. This is where quality of service policies come into play. BAP is a network traffic monitor solution designed to help you see if your prioritization policies are working by allowing you to measure the effectiveness of pre- and post-policy traffic levels per class map.

Network traffic control is also important for ensuring you get the most out of your bandwidth. With better control, you can more easily and quickly respond to issues causing network slowdowns and outages. SolarWinds Bandwidth Analyzer Pack not only monitors and measures network traffic, it also provides excellent network traffic control across devices and routers. Gain the multi-vendor flexibility you need to go beyond simple monitoring to manage and reduce extraneous traffic through intelligent analysis. BAP offers the tools you need to reduce network latency, congestion, and packet loss within the network.

Clearly view network traffic on a single screen

With BAP, you can create a customizable, comprehensive view of your network traffic on a single screen, so you can more easily analyze traffic and spot potential trouble. Since BAP includes SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, you gain an intuitive point-and-click interface to help you quickly find the cause when the bandwidth exceeds the set thresholds. You also get NetPath hop-by-hop analysis, which lets you track critical network paths at the device level. If you’re looking for additional visibility, use the intelligent mapping feature through the integrated Orion® Maps to build custom views of device relationships.

What is network traffic?

• Busy/heavy traffic, where high bandwidth is consumed
• Non-real-time traffic, which refers to the bandwidth consumed during working hours
• Interactive traffic, traffic facing competition for bandwidth, which results in slow response times if prioritizations for traffic and applications aren’t set
• Latency-sensitive traffic, which can also result in poor response times due to competition for bandwidth

Why is network monitoring important?

Gaining insights into network traffic is important when managing and measuring bandwidth (the amount of data that can be transmitted in a set amount of time) and maintaining functional bandwidth is critical to service delivery. Analyzing your network traffic can have many benefits. It can help identify network bottlenecks, which occur when there isn’t enough data handling capacity to manage the volume of traffic currently passing through. It can also help what identify users or applications are the network top talkers. This analysis has security benefits as well, since an unusually high amount of traffic in a network can indicate a cyberattack. Analyzing network traffic can also provide insights into current and past bandwidth usage patterns, allowing you to better understand your organization’s future network needs. By measuring the amounts and types of data traveling across the network, admins can better manage it to make sure the most important processes receive the required bandwidth.

How to check network traffic

• Access your router by entering your router’s IP address into a web browser.
• Once you sign in, look for a Status section on the router (you might even have a Bandwidth or Network Monitor section depending on the type of router).
• From there, you should be able to see the IP addresses of devices connected to your network.
• For most modern routers, you should be able to click through on a device level and overall network to see traffic activity.

For any organization, knowing the number of connected devices and their usage is a good first step in understanding the potential bandwidth requirements needed to support the amount of traffic on a network. However, this surface-level traffic data often doesn’t support the ability to see or act on this information at scale for devices across your environment.

The best way to check network traffic is with a tool like SolarWinds ® Bandwidth Analyzer Pack (BAP). BAP is built to automatically check and compile network traffic insights from devices across your network in a centralized dashboard and alert you to any concerning behavior in your network.

How to monitor network traffic activity

The first step in monitoring network traffic activity is to understand what you’d like to monitor or the issue you’re trying to solve. This includes monitoring traffic to servers, firewalls, or other devices on your network or for a specific issue like bandwidth usage or packet loss. By first identifying the goal of the monitoring, you can limit your FOCUS to the most important metrics to your analysis and the best tools to use to perform this troubleshooting. For example, monitoring traffic activity at the packet level can help you understand how packets travel between devices to ensure your services are being delivered. Monitoring the traffic activity between network devices can also provide insights into whether packets are being lost due to insufficient bandwidth. Using commands like tracert can provide some visibility into packets, but a packet sniffer, also called a network analyzer or a protocol analyzer, is built to intercept, log, and analyze network traffic and data. Insights into packet origin and destination, dropped packets, fluctuations in packet traffic, and similar data points can signal issues and help admins pinpoint the location of network activity issues.

What is a network traffic monitor?

While a sniffer can provide packet-level insights, only a network activity monitoring solution is designed to help you answer the question of whether network traffic levels normal for your infrastructure. Beyond simply monitoring network traffic, it’s important to have a network traffic monitoring tool to measure traffic and provide detailed analysis, allowing you to implement policy changes and maximize your bandwidth capabilities. The network traffic monitor tool in SolarWinds BAP is designed to help you identify network traffic issues with ease, so you can improve your bandwidth capabilities to ensure good performance for end users.

How does network traffic monitoring work in BAP?

SolarWinds BAP is built to monitor how traffic moves between devices and if the end-user experience is affected via packet metadata to calculate application and network response time in addition to having the ability to compare past and current levels of network traffic to highlight trends. The PerfStack ™ feature streamlines root cause identification with the option to correlate performance metrics on a drag-and-drop timeline. For admins who can’t be at their dashboard 24/7, BAP supports advanced network alerting. Use simple or complex trigger conditions to set automated alerts with the details you need to help speed troubleshooting, then configure those alerts to send to the admins of your choice.

Network traffic, also called traffic or data traffic, refers to the data moving across a network at any given time. Network data consists of packets, the smallest, fundamental units of data passed along a network. Network traffic data is broken into these packets for transmission and reassembled at the destination. Packets consist of payloads (the raw data) and headers (the metadata) containing information like origin and destination IP addresses.

There are four broad categories of network traffic:

• Busy/heavy traffic, where high bandwidth is consumed
• Non-real-time traffic, which refers to the bandwidth consumed during working hours
• Interactive traffic, traffic facing competition for bandwidth, which results in slow response times if prioritizations for traffic and applications aren’t set
• Latency-sensitive traffic, which can also result in poor response times due to competition for bandwidth

Gaining insights into network traffic is important when managing and measuring bandwidth (the amount of data that can be transmitted in a set amount of time) and maintaining functional bandwidth is critical to service delivery.

Analyzing your network traffic can have many benefits. It can help identify network bottlenecks, which occur when there isn’t enough data handling capacity to manage the volume of traffic currently passing through. It can also help what identify users or applications are the network top talkers. This analysis has security benefits as well, since an unusually high amount of traffic in a network can indicate a cyberattack.

Analyzing network traffic can also provide insights into current and past bandwidth usage patterns, allowing you to better understand your organization’s future network needs. By measuring the amounts and types of data traveling across the network, admins can better manage it to make sure the most important processes receive the required bandwidth.

Here are some basic steps required to manually check network traffic through a router:

• Access your router by entering your router’s IP address into a web browser.
• Once you sign in, look for a Status section on the router (you might even have a Bandwidth or Network Monitor section depending on the type of router).
• From there, you should be able to see the IP addresses of devices connected to your network.
• For most modern routers, you should be able to click through on a device level and overall network to see traffic activity.

For any organization, knowing the number of connected devices and their usage is a good first step in understanding the potential bandwidth requirements needed to support the amount of traffic on a network. However, this surface-level traffic data often doesn’t support the ability to see or act on this information at scale for devices across your environment.

The best way to check network traffic is with a tool like SolarWinds ® Bandwidth Analyzer Pack (BAP). BAP is built to automatically check and compile network traffic insights from devices across your network in a centralized dashboard and alert you to any concerning behavior in your network.

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Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I’m always frustrated when […] Mikrotik removes a feature that i use

Describe the solution you’d like

Accounting could theoreticaly be replaced with Kid Control, suggested by Mikrotik staff here. https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=177606 I looked a bit into new NetFlow feature but it seems like a huge overkill for simple bandwidth tracking.

Additional context

This issue references #73, here I will track changes in upcoming Pull request for this feature. I didn’t start the developement yet, I finally got some breathing room from work so I am planning to start today with this feautre.

Initial testing through RouterOS CLI is promising, after adding a dummy “Kid” /ip kid-control add name=Monitor mon=0s-1d tue=0s-1d wed=0s-1d thu=0s-1d fri=0s-1d sat=0s-1d sun=0s-1d

all devices are dynamically added and Mikrotik is starting to track Rate Up/Down, Bytes Up/Down.

[admin@MikroTikMain] /ip kid-control device print detail Flags: X. disabled, D. dynamic, B. blocked, L. limited, I. inactive 0 D name= mac-address=FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF user= ip-address=192.168.88.254 activity= rate-down=0bps rate-up=0bps bytes-down=12.6KiB bytes-up=0 idle-time=14s 1 D name=test1 mac-address=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF user= ip-address=192.168.88.1 activity=xyz.org rate-down=0bps rate-up=0bps bytes-down=478.1KiB bytes-up=572.4KiB idle-time=2s 2 D name=test2 mac-address=FF:EE:DD:CC:BB:AA user= ip-address=192.168.88.2 activity=org,xyz rate-down=0bps rate-up=0bps bytes-down=13.8KiB bytes-up=10.3KiB idle-time=8s.

Rate Up/Down is not viable, because it changes every second and shows only currenty used bandwidth, while this component polls data every 30 seconds by default (i think, I have set it to 15 seconds) Bytes Up/Down tracks sum of bandwidth used so simple diff between previous and current values could be used. We will lose packet count which was present in accounting but I belive that wasn’t usefull to anyone.

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