Stats#

Some very basic anonymous statistics are recorded regarding VPN usage. The files are stored in e.g. /var/lib/vpn-server-api/stats.json.

The statistics only store information about the last 30 days, information older than that is automatically removed.

NOTE: if you have many users (connections) it may be that PHP runs out of memory when running the stats script. You can manually update the available memory in /etc/php.ini, by increasing memory_limit = 128M to something higher, e.g. 512M. To see whether this is fixed already, follow this issue.

Format#

This is the format of the statistics file. This data can be used for further processing.

{
    "active_user_count": 0,
    "days": [
        {
            "bytes_transferred": 446155708,
            "date": "2017-06-30",
            "number_of_connections": 3,
            "unique_user_count": 1
        },
        {
            ...
        },
        {
            "bytes_transferred": 32027,
            "date": "2017-08-02",
            "number_of_connections": 1,
            "unique_user_count": 1
        }
    ],
    "generated_at": 1501632481,
    "max_concurrent_connections": 19,
    "max_concurrent_connections_time": "2017-07-31 11:44:07",
    "total_traffic": 407896290730,
    "unique_user_count": 70
}

Detailed Usage Analysis#

By directly querying the SQLite database in /var/lib/vpn-server-api/db.sqlite you can obtain more detailed information about the connections, not available through the “Stats” page in the (Admin) Portal.

If you connected your VPN server to an identity federation where multiple IdPs have access and want to see which organizations use the VPN you can do that, presuming you use the eduPersonTargetedID attribute and configured the “Shibboleth Style” serialization of the Name ID, IdP!SP!User ID, e.g. https://idp.surfnet.nl!https://nl.eduvpn.org/saml!7e17a47e96c28d65d18164ec2e03f3d1c5aabc5e.

$ sqlite3 db.sqlite "SELECT DISTINCT(user_id) FROM connection_log" | grep -v '!!' | cut -d '!' -f 1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r

The grep -v '!!' is to filter out any record of “Guest Usage” users. See below for more on this.

“Guest Usage” Analysis#

In order to check how many users you have originating from other VPN servers, you can use a very similar query:

$ sqlite3 db.sqlite "SELECT DISTINCT(user_id) FROM connection_log" | grep '!!' | cut -d '!' -f 1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r