How To Install vnStat on Debian 11

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install vnStat on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, vnStat is a console-based utility that monitors network traffic ( transmit and received ) on the selected network interface and stores it. To generate the logs, vnStat uses the information provided by the kernel.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the vnStat monitor network traffic on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 11 (Bullseye).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install vnStat on Debian 11 Bullseye

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing vnStat on Debian 11.

By default, vnStat is available on Debian’s base repository. You can install the vnStat package as follows:

sudo apt install vnstat

Once the installation is complete, start VnStat using the following command below:

sudo systemctl enable vnstat
sudo systemctl start vnstat

Step 3. Using the vnStat on Debian.

To see the network stats use the following command:

vnstat

You can see all the other options by typing this command below:

vnstat --help

Congratulations! You have successfully installed vnStat. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of the vnStat network traffic monitor on Debian 11 Bullseye. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official vnStat website.