Looking for a way to simply record bandwidth usage over time.

[Deleted member 147986]

It's surprising to me this problem does not appear to be solved yet. When I look at System Monitor in Linux Mint Cinnamon version, it will tell me how much bandwidth has been used over time. It all disappears on reboot.

What I'm looking for is simply to record this information over time, such that I can look at numbers for bandwidth usage for the last 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, 3 months, a year.

There are tools out there like MTRG and cacti which will produce pretty graphs, but no graphs exist without information input.

Can you tell me if there are any easy solutions to gathering this information in 2022?

In 2006 I wrote a perl application to read input based on iptables rules on the firewall I was using at the time in order to do this. It worked fine, but as I'm no longer using this firewall solution, this script is not all that relevant these days as it conflicts with other applications like UFW as a firewall.

While my ISP has a fair use policy, others do not. I'm very surprised nobody has made a simple bandwidth monitoring tool for users in 16 years. Seems like such an easy low effort useful project, somebody surely had done it by now. But nobody has.

At the end of the day I just want some numbers that signify my bandwidth usage, that's all. Hope you can offer suggestions to get to this goal.

 

[KGIII]

'vnStat' A Tool For Monitoring Your Bandwidth Usage • Linux Tips

'vnStat' is a wonderful tool for monitoring your bandwidth usage. This article will show you how to use vnStat effectively.

linux-tips.us

Try that. You may have to do some digging to get a refined 7 days, and 3 days, but it's the best I've got.

 

[Deleted member 147986]

'vnStat' A Tool For Monitoring Your Bandwidth Usage • Linux Tips

'vnStat' is a wonderful tool for monitoring your bandwidth usage. This article will show you how to use vnStat effectively.

linux-tips.us

Try that. You may have to do some digging to get a refined 7 days, and 3 days, but it's the best I've got.

From a quick glance at your link it seems this application has the same problem as all the others, it's just temporary analysis, or analysis of network captures. Which is useful at times, but not the running bandwidth total I'm looking for. Love Wireshark and friends, but it's not solving this problem.

 

[KGIII]

No, no... It does running amounts, like the previous month, the previous day, the current day, and total. It definitely does a running total.

It's stored in a database so you can probably mine it without too much effort. I'm sure it's stored in plain text somewhere.

 

[Deleted member 147986]

That's not a small man page. Installed it, I'll figure out how to extract information from it tomorrow. Thanks for the tip, hope it helps towards making it easier to know what your bandwidth use is.

 

[KGIII]

There's a Desklet that will show some of that information on the desktop, as you're using Cinnamon. At least there used to be. I'm sure it's still there. It is just a front end for vnstat. I want to say it's called Network Usage Monitor, but I don't have a Cinnamon DE immediately to hand.

So, you can also play with that if you want. It's just vnstat, but it's on your desktop.