I have started to do additional work with Ubuntu server over the past few months. The application I have been running on the serves consumes and generates a lot of network traffic. The easiest solution I have found to capture network traffic usage on Ubuntu server is vnStat. This tool is a network traffic monitor that is very easy to implement. The tool vnStat tracks hourly, daily and monthly traffic for the selected interfaces. You can also monitor real-time traffic on a selected NIC. Check out the quick install and examples of some of the reports you can run from vnStat. Please let us know what think about this quick and easy program to monitor network traffic on your Ubuntu server.
Ubuntu Server Quick Install
1. Log into the server.
2. Run the following command – “sudo apt-get install vnstat”
3. Note the active interfaces on your server.
After the install you will be able to gather reports about bandwidth usage. Examples are based on a machine with one NIC.
Daily Bandwidth Report
vnstat -i eth0 -d
Hourly Bandwidth Report
vnstat -i etho -h
Monthly Bandwidth Report
vnstat -i etho -m
Real time speed report
vnstat -i etho -l
