I was wondering if there are any good applications to monitor how much data I use on my laptop in a month. My net connection has a restriction of how much data I can use after which the speed goes down considerably. I saw ntop, but I just wanted to ask if there are any other good options or suggestions regarding this. Regards.
I was in a similar situation, but with slow speeds after a certain amount of data usage is reached (now I have a 16 GB 12 Mbit plan ☺) and I used
vnstat
(packagevnstat
). It's a command-line app that displays the bandwidth usage for today and previous days. as soon as it is installed, it will start monitoring the usage.Usage: run
vnstat
to view the statistics,vnstat -d
for viewing daily usage. Add-i wlan0
to the previous command if you are using a wireless network. See the manual page for it by runningman vnstat
for more information.vnStat - Light Weight Console-based Network Monitor
vnStat is a console-based network traffic monitor for Linux and BSD that keeps a log of network traffic for the selected interface(s). It uses the network interface statistics provided by the kernel as information source. This means that vnStat won't actually be sniffing any traffic and also ensures light use of system resources.
In this tutorial we'll review:
Features
Installation
nvStat is in the official repositories so no need to link to a new ppa. To install create a Terminal instance using Ctrl+Alt+T and type at the prompt:
After installation, keep your Terminal open for the following sections. There is no need to reboot.
Configuration
Pick a preferred network interface and edit the Interface variable in the
/etc/vnstat.conf
accordingly. To the list all interfaces available to vnstat, use:To start monitoring a particular interface you must initialize a database first. Each interface needs its own database. The command to initialize one for the eth0 interface is:
Start Systemd Service
After introducing the interface(s) and checking the config file. You can start the monitoring process via
systemd
:To make this service permanent use:
From now on
vnstat
will be gathering network usage in the background using such a small percentage of CPU it doesn't show up on conky's (system monitor's) top 9 list of processes (on my machine).Usage (from Command Line)
Query the network traffic:
Viewing live network traffic usage:
To find more options, use:
Monthly Totals
To see monthly totals, use:
Conky Real Time Display example
Conky is a popular light-weight System Monitor used across many Linux distributions. You can show vnStat bandwidth totals in your conky display like this:
30 second .gif of Conky's relevant section
The Conky code to produce this display is:
To save desktop space, my narrow Conky window uses "G" instead of "GiB", "M" instead of "MiB", etc. If you have more screen real estate change
substr ($10, 1, 1)
to$10
and do the same for$9
.You may have to change
enp59s0
toeth0
,wlan0
oreth1
, etc. depending on your network name reported byifconfig
.You can check NTM - Network Traffic Monitor
There is Datafox, an addon for Firefox.
This should monitor at least your bandwidth usage on the web, I don't know if it can monitor usage with other applications however.
I needed protocol granularity to see what was using data on my network, so I opted for ntop. It has a web interface, and worked out the box for me.
Sysstat
is a professional command-line monitoring utility. Install it using following command:Use
sa1
to store system status for N seconds (It stores system statues in some binary files located at/var/log/sa
):At any time use
sadf
to view network usage in some standard formats:-s
and-e
specifies start time and end time.sa18
means day 18 of current month.check the software at these site.You can track your data usage by using these applications. software recommendation
software recommendation