Four Network Monitoring Tools
I recently did a survey of network monitoring and diagnosis tools. The following is a quick description and screenshots of four of them.
| |
FC 3 | RHEL 4 | SLES 9 | SL 9.2 | Ubuntu Hoary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| iftop | extras/dag | dag | no | yes | universe |
| iptraf | yes | yes | yes | yes | main |
| ntop | dag | dag | yes | yes | universe |
| trafshow | no | no | no | no | universe |
trafshow
The trafshow command provides a very simple view of active network connections. It can report which connections are transferring the most data or show an estimated rate of transfer. This information can optionally be sorted.
iftop
The iftop command provides a rich set of information in an easily understood layout. Like top, iftop supports sorting , showing or hiding several attributes, and online help by pressing "h". It also supports the same filtering syntax as tcpdump, making it a very flexible monitoring solution.
iptraf
The iptraf command has a nice curses based interface. It has many features, including the ability to save and reload filters.
ntop
Use of ntop requires a dedicated monitoring daemon. Once the daemon has been configured and started, it provides a web interface with multiple graphs and reports.
