Here are 15 tools you can use to monitor bandwidth on Linux servers

1.nload

Commandline tool to monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic separately. More over, it also provides a graph to indicate the same. You can also adjust the scale of the graph.

2.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.

3.NetHogs

NetHogs is a small ‘net top’ tool. Instead of breaking the traffic down per protocol or per subnet, like most tools do, it groups bandwidth by process. NetHogs does not rely on a special kernel module to be loaded. If there’s suddenly a lot of network traffic, you can fire up NetHogs and immediately see which PID is causing this.

4.iftop

iftop is a command-line system monitor tool that produces a frequently-updated list of network connections. By default, the connections are ordered by bandwidth usage, with only the “top” bandwidth consumers shown.

5.bmon

bmon is a bandwidth monitor capable of retrieving statistics from various input modules. It provides various output methods including a curses based interface. bmon is intended for debugging and real-time monitoring purposes.

6.Vnstat

vnStat is a console-based network traffic monitor for Linux and BSD that keeps a log of network traffic for the selected interface(s). It uses the network interface statistics provided by the kernel as information source. This means that vnStat won’t actually be sniffing any traffic and also ensures light use of system resources.

7.slurm

Slurm is an open-source workload manager designed for Linux clusters of all sizes. It provides three key functions. First it allocates exclusive and/or non-exclusive access to resources (computer nodes) to users for some duration of time so they can perform work. Second, it provides a framework for starting, executing, and monitoring work (typically a parallel job) on a set of allocated nodes. Finally, it arbitrates contention for resources by managing a queue of pending work.

8.bwm-ng

Bandwidth Monitor NG is a small and simple console-based live network and disk io bandwidth monitor for Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and others.

9.Color Bandwidth Meter

The Color Bandwidth Meter (cbm) is a small program that displays the traffic currently flowing through your network devices.

10.Pktstat

The pktstat program displays a real-time summary of packet activity on an interface. Each line displays the data rate associated with different classes of packets.

11.Collectl

Unlike most monitoring tools that either focus on a small set of statistics, format their output in only one way, run either interatively or as a daemon but not both, collectl tries to do it all. You can choose to monitor any of a broad set of subsystems which currently include buddyinfo, cpu, disk, inodes, infiniband, lustre, memory, network, nfs, processes, quadrics, slabs, sockets and tcp.

12.dstat

Dstat gives you detailed selective information in columns and clearly indicates in what magnitude and unit the output is displayed. Less confusion, less mistakes. And most importantly, it makes it very easy to write plugins to collect your own counters and extend in ways you never expected.

13.ifstat

ifstat is a tool to report network interfaces bandwith just like vmstat/iostat do for other system counters. ifstat gathers these statistics from the kernel internal counters, which is highly operating system dependent.

14.Netload

The tool displays a small report on the current traffic load, as also the total number of bytes that have been transferred since the program first started.

15.Trafshow

The tool is used to report current active connections, their protocol and the data transfer speed on each connection.

Source: Efytimes