Network Data Usage

I live on a prepaid internet plan that is usually capped to around 7 GBs per month. Monitoring my bandwidth usage is critical for me.

While on Windows, I used Networx to track my usage, but I couldn't find anything similar for Linux so I created my own little thing - it's far from being perfect, but hey, it works!

Screenshots

Standard statistics:

Week at a glance:

Hourly Usage Notification:

Design

The application has two parts - a bash script that runs as a cron job and dumps transferred bytes to log files, and a Python script that processes the files to generate cumulative statistics like Total data downloaded/uploaded, Data Left and Suggested Usage etc.

I've also added a script that can be run as an hourly cron job to alert you (via desktop notifications) of your usage in the last hour and data remaining.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/dufferzafar/netuse ~/Downloads

sudo ln ~/Downloads/netuse/netuse.py /usr/bin/netuse
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/netuse

cp ~/Downloads/netuse/config.py.example ~/Downloads/netuse/config.py

Add this line to your cron tab (crontab -e):

*/2 * * * * ~/Downloads/netuse/dumper

To also setup hourly usage notifications:

0 * * * * /usr/bin/netuse -n

Future Ideas and TODOs

• Icons in notifications

• Use bokeh to chart out the data?

• Handle Day Night Plan calculations.

  • For monthly plans like: 10 GB Day, 10 GB Night.

• Make this, the data dumping cron job and a network usage appindicator all a part of a single big application?