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Monitor Network Traffic with vnStat on Centos 7

Monitor Network Traffic with vnStat on Centos 7
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Many server administrators need a tool to monitor the total bandwidth downloaded or uploaded to the server. The server administrator may use a control panel such as DirectAdmin, cPanel, Plesk, WebSitePanel, or Kloxo to better manage the server, depending on the server operating system. In this article, we are going to teach you How to Monitor Network Traffic with vnStat on Centos 7. It should note that you can visit the packages available in Eldernode to purchase a CentOS VPS server.

Tutorial Monitor Network Traffic with vnStat on CentOS 7

Traffic monitoring of a VPS server is one of the important things to check the performance of the server. You can use the vnStat tool to do this. Follow us in this article to teach you How to Monitor Network Traffic with vnStat on CentOS 7.

Recommended Article: Monitor Network Traffic with vnStat on Centos 7

vnStat Features:

In this section, we will introduce 14 vnStat features:

1- Statistics remain available even after system reboots

2- Monitor multiple network interfaces at the same time

3- Multiple output options

4- Sort the data by hour, day, month, week or get the top 10 days

5- Generate png graphic of the output

6- Configure “Months” to follow up with different billing cycles you may have

7- Very light – consumes a really small portion of your system resources

8- Low CPU usage no matter how much traffic you generate

9- You don’t have to be root to use it

10- Select units dynamically (KB, MB, etc)

11- You can add a legend to generated output image

12- Customizable options for content positioning and image background color to vnStat.cgi.

13- The interface bandwidth will be automatically detected.

14- Use JSON for output

How to Install vnStat on CentOS 7 | Centos 8

Once you are familiar with the features of vnStat, in this step we want to teach you how to install vnStat on CentOS 7. After installing vnStat, in the next step, we will teach you how to Monitor Network Traffic with this tool. Please join us. The first step in installing vnStat is to enable the EPEL repositories package. Then you need to execute the following commands in order:

yum -y install vnstat
systemctl start vnstat
systemctl enable vnstat
chkconfig vnstat on
service vnstat status

The important point is that if after installing the program you notice that the program is not updated or does not display any output, you should set the permissions as follows:

chown -R vnstat:vnstat /var/lib/vnstat

How to Configure vnStat on CentOS 7

In this section, we are going to configure vnStat and then how to create a database. Please join us. The first step is to edit the /etc/vnstat.conf configuration file:

vi /etc/sysconfig/vnstat

The sample output will be as follows:

VNSTAT_OPTIONS="-u -i eth0"

Now you need to enter the following command to edit /etc/vnstat.conf:

vi /etc/vnstat.conf

Set the default interface to eth1 as in the following command:

Interface "eth1"

Now save the configuration file and exit it.

To create a database, you must first set the vnStat shell to /bin/bash using the chsh command. Then create a database using the following commands:

chsh -s /bin/bash vnstat
grep --color vnstat /etc/passwd
id vnstat

Note that this is usually the first command used after a new installation. You can use the runuser command to create a database for the eth0 interface:

runuser -l vnstat -g vnstat -c '/usr/bin/vnstat -u -i eth0'

You can also run the following command to create a database for the eth1 interface:

runuser -l vnstat -g vnstat -c '/usr/bin/vnstat -u -i eth1'

Use the following commands to ensure that the vnStat user cannot log in:

chsh -s /sbin/nologin vnstat
grep --color vnstat /etc/passwd
id vnstat

How to Monitor Network Traffic with vnStat on CentOS Linux

To start the vnStat service at boot time, type the following command:

chkconfig vnstat on

You can also run the following commands to start/stop/restart and control the vnStart service, respectively:

sudo systemctl start vnstat
sudo systemctl stop vnstat
sudo systemctl restart vnstat
sudo systemctl status vnstat

How to view the statistics will be as follows. The syntax is:

vnstat

You can see an example output in the image below:

 

sample output for traffic status

 

You can enter the following command to view eth0 statistics:

vnstat -i eth0

Note that to see the daily stats for eth0, you can enter the following command:

vnstat -i eth0 -d

You can also enter the following command to see the hourly statistics:

vnstat -i eth0 -h

To see the monthly statistics, run the following command:

vnstat -i eth0 -m

Finally, to see the weekly statistics, run the following command:

vnstat -i eth0 -w

Note that you can use the following command to calculate traffic:

vnstat -i eth0 -tr

The output of the above command will be as follows:

 

sample output for traffic calculate

 

Conclusion

One of the advantages of vnStat is its lightness, which does not impose a special load on the server. This software claims to calculate all the traffic transferred on the service network, whether web server traffic or even the volume of ICMP packets. Consumer traffic will also be visible on an hourly, daily, and monthly basis. In this article, we tried to teach you how to install and monitor Network Traffic with vnStat on CentOS 7.

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