Track Your Internet Bandwidth Usage with NTM (Network Traffic Monitor)

For those of us with limited network connection Network Traffic Monitor (NTM) is a very helpful tool. It can monitor upload, download or total network traffic. It can also monitor time spent online and lot of other things. NTM is not available in Ubuntu repositories so you will have to download the .deb from here and install it. After installing start NTM from Applications->internet->NTM. Now right click on the NTM icon  in the taskbar and select preferences from the menu that appears. This will open the NTM preferences window. In the General tab specify the interface that you use to connect to internet. In my case it is wlan0

Now select Traffic tab and enter the traffic limit of your internet plan. I have entered 2G i.e 2048MB as an example value.

You can select Auto Disconnect if you want the connection to disconnect as soon as you reach your limit. This can be very helpful if extra MBs are charged at a high rate. Click Apply and you are all done. NTM will monitor your internet use and you can left click on the NTM icon in Taskbar to see your current speed, bandwidth you have consumed and lot of other information.

If you have time limited connection and not bandwidth limited i.e you buy internet hours and not GBs then you can also use NTM to keep track of time you spend on internet. Open the time tab to configure time related options.

Simple network usage tracking with vnstat

If you use Linux, you can use vnstat to track your network usage.
Install vnstat using

sudo apt-get install vnstat

then configure it to monitor a network interface

sudo vnstat -u -i

you can find your network interface name using ifconfig or ip addr command. In my case its eth0

Now to see your network usage issue vnstat command

to view daily, weekly or monthly stats you can use -d, -w or -m switches with vnstat respectively i.e vnstat -m

To reset all the counters to zero you will need to delete the interface's database with vnstat and then recreate it. Use the following command for this purpose

rm /var/lib/vnstat/<interface>; vnstat -u -i <interface>

Please note that vnstat is not a packet sniffer, it simply uses the network stats exposed by kernel. This means there is  non-internet network traffic on your interface e.g file sharing, network gaming or etc than it will also be included in the stats. You can use vnstat as bandwidth monitor if you use a dedicated interface for internet usage like 3g usb modem.