Monitoring monthly bandwidth on Linux

How much monthly bandwidth is your Linux server using?

To answer this question, we’ll use the “vnstat” utility.

Installing and using vnstat

Install vnstat:

apt-get install vnstat

Configure the network interface you want to monitor (in our example we used the “eth0” interface):

vnstat -u -i eth0

From now on, just wait a few minutes for vnstat to count enough data to display the usage reports.

To display the monthly usage report:

vnstat -m

Output of the above command:

root@ns524364:~# vnstat -m

 eth0  /  monthly

       month        rx      |     tx      |    total    |   avg. rate
    ------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
      Jan '18     10.72 MiB |   11.25 MiB |   21.97 MiB |    0.07 kbit/s
    ------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
    estimated        11 MiB |      12 MiB |      23 MiB |

Other vnstat options:

root@ns524364:~# vnstat --help
 vnStat 1.15 by Teemu Toivola <tst at iki dot fi>

         -q,  --query          query database
         -h,  --hours          show hours
         -d,  --days           show days
         -m,  --months         show months
         -w,  --weeks          show weeks
         -t,  --top10          show top 10 days
         -s,  --short          use short output
         -u,  --update         update database
         -i,  --iface          select interface (default: eth0)
         -?,  --help           short help
         -v,  --version        show version
         -tr, --traffic        calculate traffic
         -ru, --rateunit       swap configured rate unit
         -l,  --live           show transfer rate in real time