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vnStat is a low overhead simple tool useful for tracking the send / receive (RX/TX) of any given network adapter attached to your system. I use it periodically to track several of my server’s bandwidth utilization. In addition, I have also configured my bashrc file to display vnStat statistics at login after the output from Neofetch. Output from vnStat looks similar to the following:
Features
- Statistics remain available even after system reboots
- Monitor multiple network interfaces at the same time
- Multiple output options
- Sort the data by hour, day, month, week or get the top 10 days
- Generate png graphic of the output
- Configure “Months” to follow up with different billing cycles you may have
- Very light – consumes really small portion of your system resources
- Low CPU usage no matter how much traffic you generate
- You don’t have to be root to use it
- Select units dynamically (KB, MB etc)
- vnStati provides some new options like:
- -nl / –nolegend (hides the rx/tx legend)
- –altdate – use alternative date/time text location
- –headertext – to customize the text in the image header.
- You can add legend to generated output image
- Customizable options for content positioning and image background color to vnStat.cgi.
- The interface bandwidth will be automatically detected.
- Use JSON for output
In order to install VnStat, you have to enable EPEL repositories package for your version of Linux.
Next, perform the following:
1 2 3 4 5 | yum -y install vnstat systemctl start vnstat systemctl enable vnstat chkconfig vnstat on service vnstat status |
vnStat can be configured for all or just some of the NIC’s in your system. After accumulating some data, it will present a similar output as above. If you notice after installing the application that it is not updating data or displaying any output, you may need to adjust permissions as such:
1 | chown -R vnstat:vnstat /var/lib/vnstat |
