How to track internet usage (upload & download) on Linux?
Solution 1
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.
Solution 2
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.
Solution 3
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).
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Prahlad Yeri
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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Prahlad Yeri over 1 year
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?
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user almost 11 yearsVery similar, bordering on duplicate: Is there any way to see how much data I sent via Internet? at Unix.SE
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Martin Thoma about 8 yearsWhich command did you use to get this nice image? When I use
vnstati -d
it only saysAt least output mode and file parameter needs to be given.
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parkydr about 8 yearsThe image shows a vertical summary (-vs option) and you need an output file (-o option), so the command to output the above image to foo.png is 'vnstati -vs -o foo.png'
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Martin Thoma about 8 yearsThank you. And what is rx and TX?
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parkydr about 8 yearsRx - receive Tx transmit
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Martin Thoma about 8 yearsThank you very much. What do you think about adding this to your answer? So how you find what your wlan interface is and
vnstati -vs -i wlp3s0 -o ~/summary.png
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parkydr about 8 yearsifconfig will show you your networks
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Kasun Siyambalapitiya over 2 years@parkydr is there any way to view past details from vnstat (before it was installed)?
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parkydr over 2 yearsNo, vnstat does the usage logging