VNStat Data and Debian

liza · May 30, 2016, 5:34am

Been scratching my head on this one for a while trying to figure out exactly how vnstat collects the data and parses it for the “Additional Bandwidth Data”

I’ve installed this script several times on Ubuntu servers and have never really had any issues with bandwidth monitoring and collection of data. However, the two servers I have installed this on with Debian 8 don’t seem to monitor or parse or (???) the output from vnstat.

I’m looking for where vnstat stores the bandwidth data to look for a potential permissions issue but can’t seem to locate it.

What’s really bugging me is that collection WAS working and suddenly stopped. Take this screenshot here:

I’ve transferred over 2TB of data so far with lftp onto this server so far and all it has picked up is 400MB

liza · May 30, 2016, 7:30am

Scratch one of those servers off the list – a reboot seems to have kicked it back into monitoring mode.

As for the other server, somehow master wasn’t being reported directly to php. I remove the line if user = master for the bandwidth tables and everything popped up.

JMSolo · May 30, 2016, 12:19pm

###Update Sunday 05, 2016
Settled this bug as per this post:

Yes, this one is an oddity and I have encountered the very same thing on a machine running Ubuntu 16.04. I am still not certain as to why the issue arose. I checked in /var/lib/vnstat to see if something was amiss… but quite honestly, it all looked good to me.

I don’t know if vnstat itself simply hiccups when it is challenged with high bandwidth or what. I had considered moving it’s output to an actual database, rather than the cute little dump files it currently uses for the various network interfaces… but I am holding off an this for a long while.