How to know the network bandwidth used at a given time?

Question

I'm trying to build a load balancer for a program that is running in 2 different servers.

So far my load balancer, only checks the CPU usage of each server using an instance of PerformanceCounter in each server program.

I would also like to check the bandwidth usage of each server, how can I check that?

(it is probably done also using the PerformanceCounter but I'm unfamiliar with its usage)

Answer 1

Thanks to moonlight I've found this http://www.keyvan.ms/how-to-calculate-network-utilization-in-net

public double getNetworkUtilization(string networkCard){

            const int numberOfIterations = 10;

            PerformanceCounter bandwidthCounter = new PerformanceCounter("Network Interface", "Current Bandwidth", networkCard);
            float bandwidth = bandwidthCounter.NextValue();//valor fixo 10Mb/100Mn/

            PerformanceCounter dataSentCounter = new PerformanceCounter("Network Interface", "Bytes Sent/sec", networkCard);

            PerformanceCounter dataReceivedCounter = new PerformanceCounter("Network Interface", "Bytes Received/sec", networkCard);

            float sendSum = 0;
            float receiveSum = 0;

            for (int index = 0; index < numberOfIterations; index++)
            {
                sendSum += dataSentCounter.NextValue();
                receiveSum += dataReceivedCounter.NextValue();
            }
            float dataSent = sendSum;
            float dataReceived = receiveSum;


            double utilization = (8 * (dataSent + dataReceived)) / (bandwidth * numberOfIterations) * 100;
            return utilization;
        }

to find the available network cards this code helped me:

public void printNetworkCards()
        {
            PerformanceCounterCategory category = new PerformanceCounterCategory("Network Interface");
            String[] instancename = category.GetInstanceNames();

            foreach (string name in instancename)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(name);
            }
        }