In this tutorial, we will show you how to install vnStat on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, vnStat is an open-source tool that can be used to monitor the network resources of your system by using the console. With vnStat, you can monitor network statistics over various time periods. It is simple, lightweight, and consumes a small portion of your system resources. vnStat allow you to generate the network traffic data in an hour, day, month, week, and day.
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 network traffic monitor on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
- 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 useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install vnStat on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa
Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade
Step 2. Installing vnStat on Ubuntu 20.04.
VnStat is available in the repository of Ubuntu, use the apt command to install it:
sudo apt install vnstat
You can verify the installation was successful and find out the version using the command:
vnstat -v
Step 3. How To Use vnStat on Ubuntu.
To view data for all time and for all network interfaces, run vnstat without parameters:
vnstat
To view statistics every 5 minutes:
vnstat -5
For every hour:
vnstat -h
And this is how the bandwidth usage diagram will be built:
vnstat -hg
Statistics for days, months, or years, respectively:
vnstat -d vnstat -m vnstat -y
Here’s how you can see the top 10 days by overall channel usage:
vnstat -t
View summary statistics for 5 seconds in real-time:
vnstat -tr
And so the utility will show what is happening at the current moment:
vnstat -l
If you have several network interfaces, you can select one of them by specifying its name as a parameter in the command:
vnstat -i interface-name
To disable monitoring of a specific interface and remove all statistics for it, use:
sudo vnstat --remove -i interface-name --force
To add it back after that:
sudo vnstat --add -i interface-name
To apply the settings after adding, you need to restart vnstat:
sudo systemctl restart vnstat
The most useful command for operating with vnStat is the help command. 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 vnStat network traffic monitor on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official vnStat website.
