Bandwidth monitoring on linux server with iftop command

In some situations, BW monitoring is very needful for your server having high BW usage due to DNS spoofing or something like on it. IFTOP is a BW monitoring tool for your Unix/Linux server. We already covered the topic iftop installation on Unix/Linux server.

Important ‘iftop’ command switches
The below mentioned switches are very usefull with iftop command for monitoring your server for BW.

   -h                  display this message
   -n                  don't do hostname lookups
   -N                  don't convert port numbers to services
   -p                  run in promiscuous mode (show traffic between other
                       hosts on the same network segment)
   -b                  don't display a bar graph of traffic
   -B                  Display bandwidth in bytes
   -i interface        listen on named interface
   -f filter code      use filter code to select packets to count
                       (default: none, but only IP packets are counted)
   -F net/mask         show traffic flows in/out of network
   -P                  show ports as well as hosts
   -m limit            sets the upper limit for the bandwidth scale
   -c config file      specifies an alternative configuration file

Bandwidth monitoring using iftop?
We can ose the switch ‘i’ to monitor BW for each interface. Simply the ‘iftop’ command shows the current interface BW usages(Dynamic output).

Example;
[root@server ] iftop

How to find interfaces on server?
You can find out in different ways by using the following commands.

[root@server ] ip a
[root@server ] ifconfig

That’s it 🙂

Similar topics:
iftop installation on Unix/Linux server