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Monitoring network bandwidth

with iftop command

Originally published on

LinuxTechLab.com
System Admins are required to monitor IT infrastructure to make sure that everything is
up & running. We have to monitor performance of hardware i.e memory, hdds & CPUs
etc & so does we have to monitor our network. We need to make sure that our network
is not being over utilised or our applications, websites might not work. In this tutorial,
we are going to learn to use IFTOP utility.

(Recommended read : Resource monitoring using Nagios Tools for checking

system info, Important logs to monitor )

Iftop is network monitoring utility that provides real time real time bandwidth
monitoring. Iftop measures total data moving in & out of the individual socket
connections i.e. it captures packets moving in and out via network adapter & than sums
those up to find the bandwidth being utilized.

Installation on Debian/Ubuntu

Iftop is available with default repositories of Debian/Ubuntu & can be simply installed
using the command below,
$ sudo apt-get install iftop

Installation on RHEL/Centos using yum

For installing iftop on CentOS or RHEL, we need to enable EPEL repository. To enable
repository, run the following on your terminal,

RHEL/CentOS 7
$ rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-
10.noarch.rpm
RHEL/CentOS 6 (64 Bit)
$ rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-
8.noarch.rpm
RHEL/CentOS 6 (32 Bit)
$ rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
After epel repository has been installed, we can now install iftop by running,
$ yum install iftop
This will install iftop utility on your system. We will now use it to monitor our network,

Using IFTOP
You can start using iftop by opening your terminal windown & type,
$ iftop

You will now be presented with network activity happening on your machine. You can
also use
$ iftop n
Which will present the network information on your screen but with -n , you will not be
presented with the names related to IP addresses but only ip addresses. This option
allows for some bandwidth to be saved, which goes into resolving IP addresses to
names.

Now we can also see all the commands that can be used with iftop. Once you have ran
iftop, press h button on the keyboard to see all the commands that can be used with
iftop.
To monitor a particular network interface, we can mention interface with iftop,
$ iftop I enp0s3

You can check further options that are used with iftop using help, as mentioned above.
But these mentioned examples are only what you might to monitor network.
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