Question: Network monitoring with vnStat

tarius@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 15 points –

I am using vnStat to monitor network bandwidth on a Debian host that has several Docker containers. Because of the containers, there are several interfaces in addition to eth0.

My question is, should I just monitor eth0 instead of looking at all the bridge and virtual interfaces to get the actual usage because at the end of the day, everything goes through eth0? Or am I looking at this wrong?

Sample output:

                      rx      /      tx      /     total    /   estimated
 br-1ee235bc0b60:
       2024-03     13.56 MiB  /   97.42 MiB  /  110.98 MiB  /  391.02 GiB
         today     13.56 MiB  /   97.42 MiB  /  110.98 MiB  /  112.54 MiB

 br-2ce98d77a35a:
       2024-03           0 B  /         0 B  /         0 B  /     --
         today           0 B  /         0 B  /         0 B  /     --

 docker0:
       2024-03           0 B  /         0 B  /         0 B  /     --
         today           0 B  /         0 B  /         0 B  /     --

 eth0:
       2024-03     98.03 MiB  /   15.04 MiB  /  113.07 MiB  /  398.37 GiB
         today     98.03 MiB  /   15.04 MiB  /  113.07 MiB  /  114.66 MiB
1

Yes, just look at eth0. You might like the iptraf tool too.