Monitor internet speed using Asus router?

[Jonathan Dixon]

Just wondering if there are any methods of monitoring my internet speed over a period of time?

I have an Asus AC68U router and wondered if there might be an option there but I can't see anything obvious.

I'm looking at changing from Vodafone fibre to 5G and would like to be able to see the difference.

Thanks

 

[Tech9]

There is a script for Asuswrt-Merlin firmware, but I wouldn't recommend running it on your router (256MB RAM and slow CPU):

spdMerlin - spdMerlin - v4.x - speedtest and bandwidth monitoring

v4.4.5 Updated 2022-12-28 spdMerlin is an internet speedtest and monitoring tool for AsusWRT Merlin with charts for daily, weekly and monthly summaries. It tracks download/upload bandwidth as well as latency, jitter and packet loss. spdMerlin is free to use under the GNU General Public License...

www.snbforums.com

It may produce hardware limited results on your router, requires USB stick and a swap file. May make your ISP line unusable during tests.

 

[tgl]

May make your ISP line unusable during tests.

If you're doing bandwidth checks, any tool is going to clog the line --- pretty much the whole point is to saturate your link. It can be worth doing spot-checks on bandwidth, but I'm not convinced you'd learn more from constant monitoring.

I think there's a better case to be made for running routine ping tests to detect short-term service outages, dropped packets, weird latency spikes (but discount such spikes happening when you're doing a bandwidth test ...) etc etc. I have a script set up on an always-on Linux machine to do that, and I've found it informative. One ping packet every 5 or 10 seconds is plenty for this, and that won't make any dent in your normal usage. I prefer running the script on a client machine instead of the router, because (a) the logs are more readily accessible, and (b) one of the things you are monitoring for is router failure, but the router isn't going to tell you if it died.

 

[Tech9]

If you're doing bandwidth checks, any tool is going to clog the line

This is correct. When you run it though you know. The script is running it on the background multiple times a day.

 

[Jonathan Dixon]

Thanks folks

 

[mefistos]

Hey there mate, cant really help you with the router speedtest, but If you have device which can run docker there are some nice docker images. I use https://github.com/alexjustesen/speedtest-tracker myself

I run mine on NAS, but you can run docker on anything nowadays.

 

[markusd1984]

Instead of performing regular speed tests, I was wondering if there would be any way to record the actual bandwidth speed usage, as a means to evaluate average and max speeds over a period of days/weeks/months to help evaluate if it's worth upgrading internet speed i.e. from 500Mb to 1Gb speeds.

Besides total data capacity/usage/limits, I think is the most difficult one for people to evaluate and thus many either just opt in for the fastest speeds just in case or simply don't realise that they never use anything close to the speeds, thus I have been so far only paying for the 500Mb fibre broadband.

The fact that QoS can show realtime bandwidth (Mbps) total as well as per client makes me think this should be possible.

I know there is Bandwidth Monitor shell script with GUI but only for capacity as it seems (see demo).

 

[Crimliar]

The simple easy way to get a report on usage under Merlin & ATM is to use Vnstat.
You've also got the "Traffic analyser: Traffic Monitor" (Which I thought - probably wrongly - required agreement to the Trend Micro stuff).

*I love the idea of Docker (and Portainer) up to the point where I add some too many containers and thrash my drives to death!

 

[drinkingbird]

Instead of performing regular speed tests, I was wondering if there would be any way to record the actual bandwidth speed usage, as a means to evaluate average and max speeds over a period of days/weeks/months to help evaluate if it's worth upgrading internet speed i.e. from 500Mb to 1Gb speeds.

Besides total data capacity/usage/limits, I think is the most difficult one for people to evaluate and thus many either just opt in for the fastest speeds just in case or simply don't realise that they never use anything close to the speeds, thus I have been so far only paying for the 500Mb fibre broadband.

The fact that QoS can show realtime bandwidth (Mbps) total as well as per client makes me think this should be possible.

I know there is Bandwidth Monitor shell script with GUI but only for capacity as it seems (see demo).

There is the bandwidth monitor in the router, the basic portion of which does not require accepting trend micro or impacting performance. However it is not considered to be the most accurate and isn't terribly flexible.

I'm not familiar with all the addons available, there may be something out there, but what you're looking to do is best achieved with SNMP and something like Cacti, MRTG, PRTG, etc. 10 second polling is about the best you can do so you'll be looking at a 10 second average but that should be more than sufficient to see trends.

I can tell you up front that most likely you have no reason to upgrade from 500M to 1G unless you do a lot of heavy file downloading etc.