vnstat --dumpdb

[franko108]

Hi,
I have a front end https://github.com/bjd/vnstat-php-frontend , used for a very long time and it worked fine.
On the vnstat version 2.4, the command for collecting the data doesn't work anymore:
$ sudo vnstat --dumpdb
Unknown parameter "--dumpdb". Use --help for help.
This is on the Debian 10. I have an instance on Centos 7 with vnstat 1.5 and there this command is working fine.
I couldn't find in the manual the command that is doing the same job (hopefully, collect the data in the same format as it is used by frontend).

Thank you,
Best,
Frank

[vergoh]

The database implementation was rewritten in version 2.0 resulting in more logging options and configurability becoming available. For example, 1.x versions don't have -5, --y or the possibility of configuring data retention times. Due to this rewrite, the --dumpdb (which was renamed --exportdb in version 1.12 released in 2014 but still kept for compatibility) would not have anyway produced a fully matching output if all the new features would also have been shown due to the output not having any sort of versioning. --json support was introduced with versioning in version 1.14 (2015) and has been the suggested output format for external implementation use among --xml as both are versioned, usually directly supported by scripting and programming languages and provide options for limiting the output for only the needed dataset.

I'd suggest trying to get in touch with the author of vnstat-php-frontend for getting support for the --json output which is most likely the easiest to parse directly with php. The (not as suggested) alternative would be to write a wrapper that reads the --json output and converts to --dumpdb lookalike on the fly.

[mallory98e]

Dude like wtf this blows my mind, I just upgraded some of my servers from wheezy (ik) and this feature I used to extract hourly, daily data for monitoring, it's ok to implement new fancy shit like json but for gods sake leave the legacy features intact now I can spend half day to try to make sense of this json trash and adopt it for my scripts, I'm not impressed.

[vergoh]

@mallory98e - thanks for the feedback. However, please see my comment above from 2019 that explains why this had to be done. I hope you'll also find the other new features made possible by the database redesign useful. The https://github.com/vergoh/vnstat/blob/master/CHANGES file and "New configuration settings" section of https://github.com/vergoh/vnstat/blob/master/UPGRADE.md are likely the best sources for getting information of what's new and what else has changed since the older version you've been using. I'm also glad to hear (based on it not being mentioned) that no data was lost as a result of the upgrade.