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 output rules in iptbales; I want to find how many times each of them were accessed.

For example, suppose I have the following rules:

iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

iptables -A OUTPUT -o eth0 -p tcp --sport 22 -m state --state ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

iptables -A OUTPUT -o eth0 -p tcp --sport 80 -m state --state ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 443 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

iptables -A OUTPUT -o eth0 -p tcp --sport 443 -m state --state ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

I want to find out how many times each of the rules 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 were hit.

Answer 1

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 2

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 3

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

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