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I use a broadband modem to connect to internet on my linux machine. I've used the gnome-system-monitor app that correctly displays the kbps as well as total bytes consumed in each session. Now, is there any easy way in linux for me to log all these consumptions (downloads and uploads)?
The thing is that I use a limited usage plan (n number of GBs each month), hence I want to keep track of my usage. What is the best approach to do this on linux?
Install vnstat, it gives logs the usage on a network interface and you can display the usage over different time periods.
Here's the default output from my system
rx / tx / total / estimated
eth0:
Jun '13 14.40 GiB / 1.70 GiB / 16.10 GiB
Jul '13 3.57 GiB / 2.55 GiB / 6.12 GiB / 40.44 GiB
yesterday 968.58 MiB / 2.26 GiB / 3.21 GiB
today 377.88 MiB / 26.73 MiB / 404.61 MiB / 582 MiB
If you get vnstati as well, you can display the data in different ways e.g.
vnstati -d it only says At least output mode and file parameter needs to be given.
May 12, 2016 at 11:27
Easiest to use and easiest to control output and redirect to file for continuous logging:
ifstat
Probably comes with most linux distributions, and can be installed with brew on mac. Highly recommended.
vnstat is probably the best way to do this. It can be installed using the following command in terminal:
sudo apt-get install vnstat
If you don't want to keep checking the data usage status every time then use:
watch -n 5 --differences vnstat -d eth0
It would display the status every 5 seconds in the open terminal with the differences that occur in the values. -d is used to display the status of each day and eth0 is the ethernet used for internet connection (wlan0 may be used for WiFi).
