title: “Unleash Your Internet Speed Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Monitoring Network Bandwidth on Linux!” date: 2022-10-20T14:30:00Z description: “Learn how to monitor your network bandwidth on Linux and unleash your internet speed secrets!” draft: false

Are you tired of slow internet speeds and endless buffering? Do you want to know how to monitor your network bandwidth on Linux? Look no further! In this ultimate guide, we will teach you how to unleash your internet speed secrets by monitoring your network bandwidth on Linux.

Why Monitor Network Bandwidth?

Monitoring network bandwidth is essential for maintaining the speed and stability of your internet connection. By monitoring your network bandwidth, you can:

  • Identify bandwidth-hogging applications
  • Pinpoint network congestion
  • Optimize your network performance
  • Ensure a consistent and stable network connection

Now that you know why monitoring your network bandwidth is essential let’s move on to the next step- choosing the right tool.

Choosing the Right Tool

There are several tools available for monitoring network bandwidth on Linux. Some of the most popular tools are:

  • nload
  • bmon
  • vnStat
  • iftop
  • iptraf-ng

Each tool has its pros and cons. We recommend using iftop. iftop is a command-line tool that displays real-time network bandwidth usage on an interface-by-interface basis.

Installing iftop on Linux

To install iftop on Linux, follow these steps:

  1. Open your terminal
  2. Enter the following command: sudo apt-get install iftop

Configuring iftop

Now that you have installed iftop, it’s time to configure it to monitor your preferred interface. Follow these steps:

  1. Open your terminal
  2. Enter the following command: sudo iftop -i <interface> Replace with the name of the interface you want to monitor. To get a list of all available interfaces, enter the command ifconfig.

Once you have entered the above command, you will see a real-time display of network bandwidth usage on your preferred interface.

Interpreting iftop Results

Now that you have configured iftop to monitor your network bandwidth let’s interpret the results. Here’s what each column displays:

  • Source IP
  • Destination IP
  • Source port
  • Destination port
  • Protocol
  • TX (transmitted) bandwidth
  • RX (received) bandwidth
  • Total bandwidth (TX+RX)

By monitoring each column, you can identify which applications are using the bandwidth and how much bandwidth each application is using.

Conclusion

Monitoring network bandwidth on Linux is essential for maintaining the speed and stability of your internet connection. By monitoring your network bandwidth, you can identify bandwidth-hogging applications, pinpoint congestion, optimize your network performance, and ensure a consistent and stable network connection. With the right tool and configuration, you can unleash your internet speed secrets and enjoy a fast and stable internet connection.

Analyzing and monitoring the network traffic of an entire network infrastructure is a very important task for every Linux system administrator. Network admin needs to see what’s going on with the network, who’s using the bandwidth, and how their entire network infrastructure is handling the load. The good thing is there are many open-source network monitoring and traffic analysis tools available in Linux.

In this post, we will discuss some Linux command line tools that can be used to monitor the network usage.

Nload

Nload is a console application that allows users to monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic separately.

It visualizes the incoming and outgoing traffic using two graphs and provides additional info like total amount of transferred data and min/max network usage.

You can install nload by running the following command:

Now run the nload command:

Once the nload command is executed, you should see the following output.

Iptraf

Iptraf is an ncurses-based IP LAN monitoring tool that shows individual connections and the amount of data flowing between the hosts.

To install iptraf, run the following:

Once iptraf has been installed, issue the following command:

You should see the following output.

Vnstat

Vnstat is different from most of the other tools. It is a console-based network traffic monitor for Linux that runs as a daemon and keeps a log of network traffic for the selected interface. It can be used to generate a report of the network usage.

You can install vnstat by running the following command:

Now, run vnstat without any argument:

You can see the total amount of data transfer on your network.

If you want to monitor the bandwidth usage in realtime, use the -l option. It will display the total bandwidth used by incoming and outgoing data.

Now, run vnstat to monitor the bandwidth usage on the wlan0 interface:

You will see the following output.

Speedometer

Speedometer is a command line utility that can be used to monitor the current download/upload speeds of the network connections and the speeds of the file systems. Speedometer shows a graph of your current and past network speed in your console. You can also use speedometer directly on a file to monitor the download performance and history of a specific download instead of all the network traffic.

Run the following command to install speedometer in your system:

Now, run speedometer on wlan0 interface:

You will see an output similar to the following.

Iftop

Iftop is a command line tool that listens to network traffic on a given interface (such as eth0, eth1, wlan0) and shows a table of current bandwidth usage by hosts. Iftop uses the pcap library to capture the incoming and outgoing packets of the network interface.

You can easily install iftop by running the following command:

Now, run iftop with the n option that prevents iftop from resolving ip addresses to hostname:

Conclusion

I hope this post will be helpful to quickly check the network bandwidth on your Linux server. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.

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