How can I check the hit count for each rule in iptables?

Question

I want to know how can I find out which rule was accessed and how many times, from the access list I have created using iptables.

My firewall has over 1000 input and ou

Answer 1

I use the following to check on my iptables rules:

iptables -nvL [INPUT|FORWARD|OUTPUT|myCHAINNAME] --line-numbers | less

The -n speeds up the process by not doing hostname lookups

The line numbers help with deleting rules:

iptables -D [INPUT|FORWARD|OUTPUT|myCHAINNAME] [Rule#]

HTH

Answer 2

iptables will list packet and byte counters if you specify option -v for verbose, e.g. iptables -vL. Likewise iptables-save will list all entries including the mentioned counters for each chain, but not for each table entry (on some systems iptables-save requires option -c to include counters).

Answer 3

You can also use collectds iptables module to aggregate the counters:

https://collectd.org/wiki/index.php/Iptables