Big Picture with vnStat

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A co-located box on fat pipes can put pounds on you.

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A image of a server and removable drive stack

If you manage servers and need to provide some degree of reporting on network usage by those servers in a high level way (how many gigabytes of traffic passed through interface foo? last month?), then you should check out vnStat (opens in a new tab).

For a Debian Linux system, you might do something like this to install it:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y vnstat

This installs vnStat and enables a vnstat.service systemd service to run the vnstatd daemon that periodically gathers network interface usage metrics.

After vnStat has had some time to collect some metrics, you can access them at the command line. Here are a some examples from the server that manages my collection of news trends on a multitude of topics:

Show usage for today and yesterday on all interfaces

vnstat
 
                     rx      /     tx      /    total    /  estimated
 eth0:
     yesterday      9.46 MB  /  205.37 MB  /  214.83 MB
         today      1.69 MB  /   62.77 MB  /   64.46 MB  /    1.12 GB
 
 eth1:
     yesterday     53.30 MB  /  459.31 MB  /  512.61 MB
         today      2.59 MB  /   37.22 MB  /   39.80 MB  /     710 MB

Show usage for all months on the primary interface

vnstat -m
 
eth0  /  monthly
 
  month         rx      |      tx      |   total
------------------------+--------------+------------------------------------
 Jun '10     358.13 MB  |     8.61 GB  |     8.96 GB   %::::::::::::::::
 Jul '10     294.29 MB  |     5.27 GB  |     5.56 GB   %:::::::::
 Aug '10     289.47 MB  |     6.31 GB  |     6.59 GB   %:::::::::::
 Sep '10     308.96 MB  |     6.25 GB  |     6.55 GB   %:::::::::::
 Oct '10      25.25 MB  |   697.73 MB  |   722.98 MB   :
------------------------+--------------+------------------------------------
estimated       379 MB  |    10.33 GB  |    10.71 GB

Show weekly usage on the primary interface

vnstat -w
 
eth0  /  weekly
 
                    rx      |       tx      |    total
----------------------------+---------------+--------------
  last 7 days     64.96 MB  |      1.49 GB  |      1.55 GB
    last week     69.49 MB  |      1.43 GB  |      1.50 GB
 current week     64.96 MB  |      1.49 GB  |      1.55 GB
----------------------------+---------------+--------------
    estimated        74 MB  |      1.72 GB  |      1.79 GB

Note here considerably more traffic generated from people consuming the processed news trends from the front end web interface (tx) than there is coming in from user uploads (rx). This is an expected pattern for the example web app.

You can use other command options to get top 10 days in a range, do PNG graphic outputs, and more.

As always, read the fancy manual (RTFM) page with man vnstat for more possibilities.

© Brian Shumate.RSS