PHP network monitoring debian

Question

My plan is to monitor network activity/usage on eth0 on my debian wheezy 7.1 using php. Could this done be done somehow by php? Does exist some library for this? Or should I use exec() and parse the output?

Would be really thankful for every tutorial, suggestion or a tip, thanks!

Answer 1

The info you need is in /proc/net/dev

# cat /proc/net/dev
Inter-|   Receive                                                |  Transmit
 face |bytes    packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes    packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
    lo:  177937    1304    0    0    0     0          0         0   177937    1304    0    0    0     0       0          0
  eth0:16268834   14619    0    0    0 10091          0         0  1201136   10555   20    0    0     0       0          0

For the transfer rate you will have to calculate the delta from the previous capture but the value will be approximate.