Network activity monitoring: how to?
It's time for a quick toy project, namely hacking up
a network activity monitor. The requirements are really
simple, of the order of Activity Monitor's Network data
in/out graph (a line graph over time, with one line for
incoming traffic and another for outgoing).
My basic premise at this point is that I'll wrap a
netstat NSTask with the periodic (-w) flag specified,
and repeatedly parse the output and update a graph.
Sounds simple enough. However, I have two issues with
this:
- I find netstat's man-page a little mind-melting. I have
no idea what network interfaces or such to specify. My
assumption is that I'd just specify the inet address family
in order to monitor the kind of traffic I'm interested in.
- In such a graph, the x-axis is time, but how do you determine the
extent of the y-axis (amount of traffic)? Is it arbitrary? Or just
up to the sum of the theoretical maximums allowed by the interfaces'
hardware (and if so, how do I actually determine that
programmatically)? Or what?
If anyone can enlighten me a bit about how to approach the problem,
I'd be most grateful.