How to display network traffic in the terminal?

Question

how to display the actual network traffic (wireless) in a terminal?

Additionally: Is it possible to add this info to the chart of top?

Answer 1

Here are some nice tools in the Ubuntu repositories for command line network traffic monitoring:

bmon

Shows multiple interfaces at once

slurm

Has nice colored graphs

tcptrack

A favorite. Tells how much bandwidth is being used and also what protocol (service/port) and destination the transmission is taking place to. Very helpful when you want to know exactly what is using up your bandwidth

Answer 2

iftop

It's quite easy! Install "iftop" with:

sudo apt install iftop

Then run

sudo iftop

The application looks like this:

Answer 3

Nethogs

sudo apt install nethogs
sudo nethogs

The thing that's different and maybe is cooler about this one is that it shows traffic per process, like the image shows

Answer 4

There is a nice tool called speedometer that displays a graph in the terminal using Unicode block characters, colors, and even adds labels to each peak in the graph.

$ sudo apt-get install speedometer
$ speedometer -l  -r wlan0 -t wlan0 -m $(( 1024 * 1024 * 3 / 2 ))

It has several options, can monitor multiple interfaces, can show multiple graphs in several rows or columns, and can even monitor the download speed of a single file (by watching the file size on disk).

Answer 5

iptraf

IPTraf is a console-based network statistics utility for Linux. It gathers a variety of figures such as TCP connection packet and byte counts, interface statistics and activity indicators, TCP/UDP traffic breakdowns, and LAN station packet and byte counts.

Features

An IP traffic monitor that shows information on the IP traffic passing over your network. Includes TCP flag information, packet and byte counts, ICMP details, OSPF packet types. General and detailed interface statistics showing IP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, non-IP and other IP packet counts, IP checksum errors, interface activity, packet size counts. A TCP and UDP service monitor showing counts of incoming and outgoing packets for common TCP and UDP application ports A LAN statistics module that discovers active hosts and shows statistics showing the data activity on them TCP, UDP, and other protocol display filters, allowing you to view only traffic you're interested in. Logging Supports Ethernet, FDDI, ISDN, SLIP, PPP, and loopback interface types. Utilizes the built-in raw socket interface of the Linux kernel, allowing it to be used over a wide range of supported network cards. Full-screen, menu-driven operation.

Protocols Recognized

IP TCP UDP ICMP IGMP IGP IGRP OSPF ARP RARP

Non-IP packets will simply be indicated as "Non-IP" and, on Ethernet LAN's, will be supplied with the appropriate Ethernet addresses.

Supported Interfaces

Local loopback All Linux-supported Ethernet interfaces All Linux-supported FDDI interfaces SLIP Asynchronous PPP Synchronous PPP over ISDN ISDN with Raw IP encapsulation ISDN with Cisco HDLC encapsulation Parallel Line IP

Source http://iptraf.seul.org/about.html

Installation

With apt:

apt-get install iptraf

Or download the source:

http://iptraf.seul.org/download.html

Screenshots

Current Connections:

Current Ports:

Summary of all Interfaces:

Detailed per Interface:

Source http://iptraf.seul.org/shots.html

Answer 6

tcpdump -i eth0 

That will give you a streaming information of all the data flowing from that interface (your ethernet card). Similar to wireshark.

Use ifconfig to see a list of your machines interfaces.

Answer 7

I think ifconfig [interface] will do that. Like:

gevorg@gevorg-TravelMate-3260:~$ ifconfig wlan0
wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:18:de:89:52:71  
          BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

gevorg@gevorg-TravelMate-3260:~$ ifconfig eth0
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:36:bf:92:e3  
          inet addr:192.168.10.100  Bcast:192.168.10.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::216:36ff:febf:92e3/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:342765 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:306183 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:373934806 (373.9 MB)  TX bytes:39111569 (39.1 MB)
          Interrupt:16 

It shows RX bytes:73934806 (373.9 MB) and TX bytes:39111569 (39.1 MB).

Answer 8

Another useful tool is sar. Install it,

apt install sysstat

How to use it:

sar -n DEV  1

And Brendan's amazing graph guide:

References

• http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html
• Linux Performance Observability: sar

Answer 9

If you are looking for something extremely simple, but still useful, try ifstat

$ sudo apt-get install ifstat
$ ifstat
       eth0               wlan0       
 KB/s in  KB/s out   KB/s in  KB/s out
    0.00      0.00      0.96      4.79
    0.00      0.00      0.04      0.14

It monitors all interfaces at once, printing a new line every second. Useful to pipe into another script, or to leave running and observe the bandwidth usage over time. Not as pretty as other tools, but it gets the job done.

There are some useful options listed in the manpage:

-z  Hides interface which counters are null, eg interfaces that are up but not used.
-n  Turns off displaying the header periodically.
-t  Adds a timestamp at the beginning of each line.
-T  Reports total bandwith for all monitored interfaces.
-S  Keep stats updated on the same line if possible (no scrolling nor wrapping).
-b  Reports bandwith in kbits/sec instead of kbytes/sec.

Answer 10

This is not specific to networking, but Glances can display network traffic of different interfaces.

Install it with one of those commands :

sudo snap install glances
sudo apt install glances

Answer 11

According to ifconfig man:

This program is obsolete! For replacement check ip addr and ip link. For statistics use ip -s link.

So using ip command:

 $ ip -s link

We can get network stats:

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    RX: bytes  packets  errors  dropped overrun mcast
    173654497900 26078946 0       0       0       0
    TX: bytes  packets  errors  dropped carrier collsns
    173654497900 26078946 0       0       0       0
2: ens3: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 12:34:56:78:90:00 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    RX: bytes  packets  errors  dropped overrun mcast
    3650412438854 399476618 0       2551849 0       0
    TX: bytes  packets  errors  dropped carrier collsns
    617437624480 321390259 0       0       0       0

Or

$ ip -s -h link

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00 promiscuity 0 addrgenmode eui64
    RX: bytes  packets  errors  dropped overrun mcast
    174G       26.1M    0       0       0       0
    TX: bytes  packets  errors  dropped carrier collsns
    174G       26.1M    0       0       0       0 2: ens3: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 12:34:56:78:90:00 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff promiscuity 0 addrgenmode eui64
    RX: bytes  packets  errors  dropped overrun mcast
    3.65T      399M     0       2.55M   0       0
    TX: bytes  packets  errors  dropped carrier collsns
    617G       321M     0       0       0       0

Answer 12

Install ’vnstat’ it can show traffic for an interface. You can install some plotting packages to get some nice graphs.

Answer 13

Also you could use iftop utility

Answer 14

A powerful tool bpytop like a Swiss army:

Install:

sudo apt install bpytop

List interfaces:

ip -br -c a

Monitor all resources:

bpytop

Also, you can customize your output schema with numbers:

{1,2,3,4}

• btop: github.com
• bpytop: github.com

Answer 15

Ifstat is good tool and it will give you all the interface network usage with respect to time.

sudo apt-get install ifstat

Answer 16

Another possible tool is called nload. http://linux.die.net/man/1/nload

Similar to slurm or bmon, but a little more simplistic.

Answer 17

There is another tool called bandwhich

Answer 18

And this is a blog showing a list of command to monitor bandwidth:

http://www.binarytides.com/linux-commands-monitor-network/

UPDATE:

I've been using NetHogs for about two months. It shows you total bandwidth usage. With the following setting you can additionally get bandwidth usage for each program

sudo nethogs -v 3

Answer 19

Another nice option written in Rust is bottom.

Install

A .deb file is provided on each stable release and nightly builds for x86, aarch64, and armv7. Some examples of installing it this way:

# x86-64
curl -LO https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom/releases/download/0.10.2/bottom_0.10.2-1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i bottom_0.10.2-1_amd64.deb
ARM64
curl -LO https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom/releases/download/0.10.2/bottom_0.10.2-1_arm64.deb
sudo dpkg -i bottom_0.10.2-1_arm64.deb
ARM
curl -LO https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom/releases/download/0.10.2/bottom_0.10.2-1_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i bottom_0.10.2-1_armhf.deb
musl-based
curl -LO https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom/releases/download/0.10.2/bottom-musl_0.10.2-1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i bottom-musl_0.10.2-1_amd64.deb

Use

btm

Answer 20

I recently discovered wavemon which can easily be installed using apt-get install wavemon.

This tool provides information especially on the signal level of the wireless network.

Answer 21

This does the trick without needing to install anything special and without needing to be root either:

for i in {1..60};do echo `ifconfig eth0 | grep X.pa`;sleep 1;done 

replace eth0 with whatever interface you want to look at.

sample output:-

RX packets 7838573576 bytes 5261871317174 (4.7 TiB) TX packets 5420075700 bytes 2937680670358 (2.6 TiB)
RX packets 7838574080 bytes 5261871493163 (4.7 TiB) TX packets 5420076058 bytes 2937680745341 (2.6 TiB)
RX packets 7838574496 bytes 5261871573887 (4.7 TiB) TX packets 5420076379 bytes 2937680870613 (2.6 TiB)

Answer 22

nettop is another option (not in the standard linux repos).

To build clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/Emanem/nettop.git

Install the dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev build-essential libpcap-dev

And build the binary:

make

Run with:

sudo ./nettop

^{Btw, macos has a built-in utility called nettop which does the same thing but has more features.}

Answer 23

For me, Slurm worked well:

Install:

sudo apt install slurm

List interfaces

ifconfig

Monitor interface (change eth0):

slurm -i eth0

Answer 24

Get your answer direct from the process: cat /proc/net/dev easily filtered by line to get a specific interface, e.g. cat /proc/net/dev | grep eth0

Inter-|   Receive                                                |  Transmit
 face |bytes    packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes    packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
    lo:  176979    1003    0    0    0     0          0         0   176979    1003    0    0    0     0       0          0
  eth0: 58424096 208513    0  428    0     0          0         0 53857573  355931    0    0    0     0       0          0

Answer 25

There's also conky.

You might have the package listed in your system's currently used repositories. Try running:

sudo apt-get install conky-all

Some basic configuration info: Ubuntu Community Docs: Configuring Conky. CAUTION: The info on that site may be out of date, so please verify the steps listed there apply to your system.

Of course, a basic conky is very boring to look at, so here's a good conky theme to get you started:

conky_themes: Just follow the instructions on that page for setup; to install a particular theme, copy the .conkyrc file from the corresponding folder for the theme in the .harmattan-themes folder to your home directory.

Then, edit the file according to the instructions on the linked page.

TIP: Modify the file after copying it to your home folder, this way you get to keep the original unaltered files in case you need to re-copy the .conkyrc file for a theme.

Answer 26

If you cannot install apps, or are on a very limited system you can use this.

watch ifconfig

or if you want to monitor a specific interface

watch ifconfig eth0

It will update every 2 seconds showing teh total data transferred so far on the interface RX and TX. Not very spectacular, but if you just want to check data is being transferred and estimate the rate you can look at the RX and TX stats:

Every 2.0s: ifconfig enxc03ebaa1c64e                          simon-XPS-15-7590: Tue Jan 14 09:18:49 2025
enxc03ebaa1c64e: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 172.16.136.7  netmask 255.255.0.0  broadcast 172.16.255.255
        inet6 fdfd:f92:7669:0:6646:8a79:5e74:b0af  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x0<global>
        inet6 fdfd:f92:7669::1bc  prefixlen 128  scopeid 0x0<global>
        inet6 fe80::cb87:8138:699b:5462  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        inet6 fdfd:f92:7669:0:89e8:cb34:8787:d688  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x0<global>
        ether c0:3e:ba:a1:c6:4e  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 284886  bytes 134356876 (134.3 MB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 1222  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 55743  bytes 21461153 (21.4 MB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

Answer 27

VnStat is a fully-featured, command line-based program to monitor Linux network traffic and bandwidth utilization in real-time, on Linux and BSD systems.

Install:

sudo apt install sysstat