[PLUG] Munin, comcast, bits, bytes oh bother.....

[Sean Whitney]

I'm writing a plugin for munin to monitor my monthly bandwidth usage.

Comcast has a "250GB" cap in place, that I've blown through 4 out of the
last 5 months.  June was 346GB according to Comcast.  The second day of
July and I've already used 4% of my cap.

The plugin looks at my outside facing interface, adds upstream and
downstream bytes together and divides by the uptime.  This gives me
bandwidth usage for a daily and a monthly average and let's me look at
see what direction it's trending.

My question.  ifconfig provides bandwidth in bytes and normally I'd just
multiply by 8 and get bits and be done with it.  However Comcast in
their infinite wisdom has decided to display the "bandwidth" usage in
bytes too. So I really want to show "bandwidth" in bytes so I'm looking
at apples.

There is a scaling value in munin if you are looking at memory or
traffic you can stipulate 1000 or 1024 as the multiple.  I'm leaning
towards using the 1024 value to show bytes, but it just seems "wrong".


Sean