Capture bandwidth usage from remote machine across time

I would like to capture the bandwidth usage to and from one specific remote machine across time on my system. iftop command is definitely one option, which gives the network usage, and has filtering , but I need to parse the text output to get the incoming bandwidth usage and outgoing bandwidth usage. sudo iftop -t -s 2 -f "src host " My current plan is to run the above command in a loop, parse the text output each time and append to a csv file (current_time, transmitted, received). Is there a better alternative ?