How To Install vnStat on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install vnStat on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, VnStat is a console-based network traffic monitoring tool designed for Linux and BSD. vnStat keeps a log of hourly, daily, and monthly network traffic for the selected interfaces.

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 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04, 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 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 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

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 22.04.

By default, vnStat is available on Ubuntu 22.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to install the latest version of vnStat to your Ubuntu system:

sudo apt install vnstat

After successfully installation, enable vnStat (to start automatically upon system boot), start, and verify the status using the commands below:

sudo systemctl enable vnstat
sudo systemctl start vnstat
sudo systemctl status vnstat

Step 3. Monitor Network Traffic using vnStat.

Once successfully installed, you can view some of the available vnStat options by executing the below command in Terminal:

vnstat --help

For example, to view live network traffic run the following command:

vnstat -i [your-interface-name] -l

For example, to view hourly traffic using the following command:

vnstat -h

For example, to view daily network traffic using the command below:

vnstat -d

Congratulations! You have successfully installed vnStat. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the vnStat console-based network traffic monitor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official vnStat website.