For big parts of my VPN needs I use OpenVPN. Especially on iOS devices the deep integration just works. Even to a degree that you enable the VPN once and the device will transparently keep it up / reestablish connections when required.

OpenVPN protocol has emerged to establish itself as a de- facto standard in the open source networking space with over 50 million downloads. OpenVPN is entirely a community-supported OSS project which uses the GPL license.

VISIT THE OPENVPN COMMUNITY

I am using the dockerized version of OpenVPN. From there I’ve got several ways to get telemetry data (like connections, traffic, …) out of it. One way is the management interface provided by OpenVPN. Another way is by using the default openvpn-status.log file.

Since the easiest way out-of-the-box was to use the logfile I sat down and wrote a little 2mqtt bridge for the contents of the logfile.

It’s also dockerized so you can easily set it up by pointing the openvpn-status.log to the right volume/mount-point.

When done it’ll produce MQTT messages like this:

The set-up and start-up is rather simple:

docker run -d --restart=always --volume /openvpnstatus2mqttconfiglocation/:/configuration --volume /openvpnstatusloglocation/:/openvpn openvpn-status2mqtt

MQTT Broker, Topic-Prefix and so on are configured with the .json configuration file found along the project.

Of course everything I wrote is available on GitHub as open-source.

The immediate outcome of this is that with the always-on VPN I am now getting statistics about, for example, the data consumption of my iPhone.

The big traffic spike at 1 AM is the backup that my iPhone does every night. Very interesting also how often the connection is closed and opened again even without me using the phone…