"Data usage statistics" not shown

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

Ubuntu Trusty r188

1. Go to System Settings > "Cellular".
2. Choose "Data usage statistics".

What happens: There's no such item.

What should happen: You're taken to a "Data usage" screen.
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Networking#cellular-usage>

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Confirmed, we need ofono to provide us the statistics first though (which is not implement iirc)

[Tony Espy (awe)]

Monitoring data usage is not a feature supported by oFono ( or rild for that matter ). NetworkManager uses oFono to activate the cellular data connection, and then it sets up a default route for the device. As none of the actual network traffic flows through oFono ( or NM ) itself, it's not really something that oFono can provide.

This kind of data tracking needs to be done via direct monitoring of the actual network interfaces via the kernel /proc or /sysfs.

[Tony Espy (awe)]

I've marked the ofono task Invalid. If there's disagreement about this, please let me know.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks Tony, I don't especially disagree but do you have a suggestion about what process should be watching those interfaces? It can't be ubuntu-system-settings since that's not running all the time, should it be n-m doing it (in which case should be reopen and reassign from ofono to it)?

[Niklas Wenzel (nikwen)]

In addition to the information provided in the mockup from the design team it would be nice to see stats on a per-app basis.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

(Niklas, I reported that as bug 1387047. If you have them, please add use cases, comparison screenshots, etc to that bug report.)

[Niklas Wenzel (nikwen)]

@Matthew Paul Thomas: Thanks, I'll comment on the other bug.

[Alfonso Sanchez-Beato (alfonsosanchezbeato)]

We have already implemented a data usage information DBus interface in network-manager, which includes cellular radio interfaces. indicator-network will eventually use it to show when there is data being transmitted. It probably should also log the number of tx/rx bytes so this information can be shown later by u-s-s.

[Jonas G. Drange (jonas-drange)]

Great. Maybe the private Connectivity API can expose this information so that USS can get a total data usage via an endpoint like GetHistory(device|type|app, timespan, resolution)?

@Alfonso, is this DBus interface documented somewhere? Can it be broken down per device, type or app? It would be nice to solve bug 1387047 at the same time as solving this one.

[Alfonso Sanchez-Beato (alfonsosanchezbeato)]

@Jonas, this is the spec:

https://developer.gnome.org/NetworkManager/unstable/gdbus-org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Device.Statistics.html

(we already upstreamed it, and backported to vivid).

[Renato Araujo Oliveira Filho (renatofilho)]

Hi guys, Just to keep in mind that we have already a Qt API to be used by clients app, we probably just need integration with the DBUS API.

http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qnetworksession.html