I’m wondering what the best way to monitor traffic is? At the moment I’m using vnstat, and vnstati(I dump the graphs to the built in webserver directory). Is there a standard way of logging traffic(not a router expert)?
It really depends on precisely what you mean by “monitor traffic”, but netflow is very handy.
I am fairly new to most of these opensource tools, but when I need to do some live monitoring, or daily monitoring of hardware devices, I use Iptraf. I prefer using the hardware monitor, so I can see the overall traffic going through a specific MAC, rather than the bulk of IP addresses and ports associated with different connections. But the purpose for which I use Iptraf is to monitor bandwidth abusers. Now, if I was looking for ports and what not, then I would monitor a specific interface or use other tools like netwatch.