Network Traffic Monitor Tool for Mac
Written by Guillermo Garron
Date: 2014-06-28 23:05:00 00:00
If you have a capped connection to the Internet, something like LTE o 3G connection, then you may want to monitor how much bandwidth your Mac is using. There are some tools to help you on this.
The best option for me is vnstat, it will let you monitor the monthly used bandwidth by your Mac, then you can add it to what was used by your phone, and know how much your bill is going to be.
Of course this is an estimation, but it is better than nothing.
Install vnstat
To install vnstat, I used brew.
brew install vnstat
How to use it
The first time you run it, it will initialize the database, after that, you just run.
vnstat
And it will have and output like this one:
en1:
May '14 991.13 MiB / 243.85 MiB / 1.21 GiB
Jun '14 3.47 GiB / 308.60 MiB / 3.77 GiB / 4.04 GiB
yesterday 206.69 MiB / 11.44 MiB / 218.13 MiB
today 536.80 MiB / 33.95 MiB / 570.75 MiB / 587 MiB
You can have a daily usage report.
vnstat -d -i en1
The -d option tells the command to show the day usage, and -i en1 tells it to show that data from the en1 interface, which is my wifi interface in my Mac. The output will be something like this:
en1 / daily
day rx | tx | total | avg. rate
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
05/24/14 4.67 MiB | 1.14 MiB | 5.80 MiB | 0.55 kbit/s
05/25/14 461.26 MiB | 19.67 MiB | 480.93 MiB | 45.60 kbit/s
05/26/14 47.67 MiB | 7.03 MiB | 54.70 MiB | 5.19 kbit/s
05/27/14 202.47 MiB | 19.53 MiB | 222.00 MiB | 21.05 kbit/s
05/28/14 38.70 MiB | 164.02 MiB | 202.71 MiB | 19.22 kbit/s
05/29/14 122.98 MiB | 11.75 MiB | 134.73 MiB | 12.77 kbit/s
05/30/14 64.29 MiB | 11.86 MiB | 76.14 MiB | 7.22 kbit/s
05/31/14 49.10 MiB | 8.85 MiB | 57.96 MiB | 5.49 kbit/s
06/01/14 84.87 MiB | 11.63 MiB | 96.50 MiB | 9.15 kbit/s
06/02/14 64.61 MiB | 3.34 MiB | 67.95 MiB | 6.44 kbit/s
06/06/14 99.24 MiB | 16.25 MiB | 115.49 MiB | 10.95 kbit/s
06/07/14 97.61 MiB | 29.81 MiB | 127.42 MiB | 12.08 kbit/s
06/08/14 189.66 MiB | 17.25 MiB | 206.91 MiB | 19.62 kbit/s
06/09/14 17.85 MiB | 6.21 MiB | 24.07 MiB | 2.28 kbit/s
06/11/14 17.63 MiB | 7.67 MiB | 25.30 MiB | 2.40 kbit/s
06/13/14 23.33 MiB | 3.25 MiB | 26.58 MiB | 2.52 kbit/s
06/14/14 293.95 MiB | 12.74 MiB | 306.69 MiB | 29.08 kbit/s
06/15/14 262.32 MiB | 83.59 MiB | 345.91 MiB | 32.80 kbit/s
06/16/14 48.44 MiB | 1.34 MiB | 49.78 MiB | 4.72 kbit/s
06/17/14 0 KiB | 0 KiB | 0 KiB | 0.00 kbit/s
06/19/14 14.34 MiB | 2.16 MiB | 16.50 MiB | 1.56 kbit/s
06/20/14 3.29 MiB | 979 KiB | 4.24 MiB | 0.40 kbit/s
06/21/14 1.52 GiB | 62.21 MiB | 1.58 GiB | 153.10 kbit/s
06/22/14 6.46 MiB | 1.43 MiB | 7.89 MiB | 0.75 kbit/s
06/24/14 29.54 MiB | 3.03 MiB | 32.56 MiB | 3.09 kbit/s
06/25/14 570 KiB | 361 KiB | 931 KiB | 0.09 kbit/s
06/27/14 206.69 MiB | 11.44 MiB | 218.13 MiB | 20.68 kbit/s
06/28/14 536.80 MiB | 33.95 MiB | 570.75 MiB | 55.86 kbit/s
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
estimated 553 MiB | 34 MiB | 587 MiB |
As you can see I don't use my Mac everyday.
Hope this may help someone having the same needs I had.