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01.30.09 How To Monitor Your Linux Network Bandwidth Usage  By
Pete Freitag
Did you ever wonder how much bandwidth your linux server is using each month, or each day? There are a number of tools that can give you this information, but many of them are packet sniffers, and can effect performance. I recently came across a really nice lightweight tool that monitors your network bandwidth utilization on Linux (actually I just learned that it also works on BSD operating systems as well, eg. Mac OSX , so I am running it on my desktop now as well) called vnstat. It works by analyzing the /proc stats on Linux (at regular intervals using a cron job), and then stores summaries in a really small database. You can then access these stats whenever using the vnstat command line utility. For example if you run vnstat -m it will generate a nice plain text summary report:  That particular server is only being used for backups right now, so the numbers are kind of low.
Highly recommend this tool if you are looking for a simple and lightweight way to monitor network bandwidth. Here's a full list of command line options:  Comments About the Author: Pete Freitag (http://www.petefreitag.com/) is a software engineer, and web developer located in central new york. Pete specializes in the HTTP protocol, web services, xml, java, and coldfusion. In 2003 Pete published the ColdFusion MX Developers Cookbook with SAMs Publishing. Pete owns a Firm called Foundeo (http://foundeo.com/) that specializes in Web Consulting, and Products for Web Developers. |
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