Monitoring Bandwidth with VNstat

VNstat is a bandwidth monitoring tool that will let you monitor your bandwidth and provide daily, weekly and monthly tracking metrics.

To install and setup Vnstat, you will need to follow the steps in this article.

1. Log into your linux server and type the following command.wget http://humdi.net/vnstat/vnstat-1.10.tar.gz
2. Next to uncompress the file you will need to run the following command. tar -zxvf vnstat-1.10.tar.gz
3. Now that you have the file uncompressed, you will need to install Vnstat. To do this, you will need to navigate to the VNstat directory and run the following command. make & make install
4. Now that it has been installed, you will first need to run "vnstat --iflist" on your server, so you know the name of your network adaptors. vnstat --iflist
5. You will now be presented with the any available adaptors on your server. Available interfaces lo eth0 sit0
6. Now that you know what adaptors you have on your server, you will need to tell VNstat to create a small database for that adapator. To do this, simply type /usr/bin/vnstat -u -i then the adaptor name. So for our example, we would run the following /usr/bin/vnstat -u -i eth0 If you have multiple adaptors, you will need to do this for each adaptor. However you do not have to if you only want to monitor specific adaptors.
7. Next, make sure that Vnstat restarts whenever you reboot your server. To do this, add the service to your server's "Chkconfig" list by running the following command. chkconfig --add vnstat
chkconfig vnstat on
8. Now you can access Vnstat by logging into the server at anytime and typing "vnstat". Doing so will give you a realtime status of your bandwidth.