Comments on Installing and using vnStat and vnStati for Monitoring Network Traffic in Ubuntu

Monitoring Network Traffic or Bandwidth Usage is an important task in an organisational structure or even for developers. It is sometimes required to monitor traffic on various systems which share the internet bandwidth. There might be situations where network statistics are required for decision making in the networking areas or use the logged information on the network traffic for analysis tasks.

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By: J_Kruis

Typo

To view all the network interfaces available in your system, use the command:

vnstat --islist

should be

To view all the network interfaces available in your system, use the command:

vnstat --isflist

By: Jeremy

should actually be --iflist

By: robUI

Can't get passed the "vnstat -u -i eth0" step for some reason. Always gives me the same error message (unable to create database backup).

What to do now?

 

By: Akhil

How to begin my moth from 1st

By: Dinesh

try sudo, make sure you have eth0 interface active using ifconfig command, sudo worked for me in this case.

By: Txetxu

The command for list interfaces have a mistake, the correct is: "vnstat --iflist"

By: qoley

thanks for that. its really help me for digitalocean vps. Thanks

By: nigratruo

Would you kindly date your article, so we know how old this is? This is important, because we have all come across a stale article from 2006 that was totally depreciated.

By: Mark

This sounded the perfect solution for me. However, it doesn't work, the servers run, the output tells me as such but the statistics are not being recorded. Then there's this BS about device names changing and other crap from the Debian group, what a load of bollocks explanation. Really am fed up of Linux. I really can't believe that I am about to say this but I am off to buy a Windows 10 installer and key.

By: till

Just a guess, your network interface might have a different name than eth0. Check the network device name with ifconfig command.

By: Piermarco Barbe

Service is not running from your example of `ps -f | grep vnst`

By: Hossein

Thank you very much.

By: Imran

vnstat –-create –i eth0

then restart the service

systemctl restart vnstat

By: Fedon Kadifeli

In newer versions (Ubuntu 19.04) vnstat daemon will start automatically after the installation. Also your

ps -f | grep vnst

output is wrong.

By: John

This is well done thank you. Is it possible to monitor all networked devices (nodes) on a LAN? It seems vnstat is just getting your interfaces (eth0 or wlan0 for example) of the device you installed vnstat on.

By: Handy

Date  2021-09-05

No idea when this was originated but I have had good use of it today, to get quick comands set up

 

-h

By: John

Thanks, this is very helpful.  Just installed but it seems to work perfectly in Ubuntu 21.10 including the vnstati producing the .png summary.  All I had to do was change the ethernet number. I thought it would be complicated but not so far!