Monitoring internet activity

Question

I'm looking into writing a small app (in Python) that monitors internet activity. The same idea as NetMeter except with a little more customisation (I need to be able to set off-peak time ranges).

Anyway, I've been having a little trouble researching these questions:

• Does Python have an API to monitor this?
• As far as data collecting goes I'll probably be recording values in bytes/min with the timestamp - is there something more sensible I'm missing here?

Answer 1

The pylibpcap project may actually give you what you want out of the box, or at least a leg up on implementing one yourself. It's a set of python bindings, as the name suggests, to the libpcap packet capture library.