How to track internet usage (upload & download) on Linux?

I use a broadband modem to connect to internet on my linux machine. I've used the gnome-system-monitor app that correctly displays the kbps as well as total bytes consumed in each session. Now, is there any easy way in linux for me to log all these consumptions (downloads and uploads)?

The thing is that I use a limited usage plan (n number of GBs each month), hence I want to keep track of my usage. What is the best approach to do this on linux?

3 Answers

Install vnstat, it gives logs the usage on a network interface and you can display the usage over different time periods.

Here's the default output from my system

 rx / tx / total / estimated
eth0: Jun '13 14.40 GiB / 1.70 GiB / 16.10 GiB Jul '13 3.57 GiB / 2.55 GiB / 6.12 GiB / 40.44 GiB yesterday 968.58 MiB / 2.26 GiB / 3.21 GiB today 377.88 MiB / 26.73 MiB / 404.61 MiB / 582 MiB

If you get vnstati as well, you can display the data in different ways e.g.

Easiest to use and easiest to control output and redirect to file for continuous logging:

ifstat

Probably comes with most linux distributions, and can be installed with brew on mac. Highly recommended.

vnstat is probably the best way to do this. It can be installed using the following command in terminal:

sudo apt-get install vnstat

If you don't want to keep checking the data usage status every time then use:

watch -n 5 --differences vnstat -d eth0

It would display the status every 5 seconds in the open terminal with the differences that occur in the values. -d is used to display the status of each day and eth0 is the ethernet used for internet connection (wlan0 may be used for WiFi).