DarkStat is a simple Packet Sniffing Network Traffic/Bandwidth monitoring utility for Linux and UNIX. DarkStat presents simple webinterface with nice graphs and stats auto-refreshed. Darkstat uses a very low footprint and the memory, CPU usage and is used in pfSense, redWall opensource firewalls.

One of the first things I do upon installing a Linux distribution is put the Network Monitor applet on my GNOME panel. Watching the blue lights twinkle on and off makes me aware of network traffic.

In these days of bandwidth caps and pay-per-kilobyte rates, keeping an eye on your bandwidth usage makes a lot of sense. While there is no lack of bandwidth monitoring utilities, vnStat stands out from the crowd thanks to its ability to store monitoring data in a database and resume monitoring automatically on reboot.

ntop is a free opensource network traffic probe that shows the network usage. ntop is based on libpcap and can run on Linux/Unix and Windows operating system. ntop provides a very easy to use a web access to navigate through ntop traffic information and get a dump of the network status.

A group called the Traffic Squeezer project released an open source application that accelerates WAN network traffic. The Traffic Squeezer software uses lossless compression and other procedures to accelerate traffic on Linux-based network devices, and it's said a port to an embedded hardware version is planned.

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. IPTraf is an IP traffic monitor that shows information on the IP traffic passing over your network.

This how-to will teach you two commands, iftop and nethogs, that you can use to monitor network traffic on a Linux machine. You can use iftop to view traffic by individual connection, port, network segment, or remote host, which gives you a detailed accounting of all packets coming in and out of your machine.

By using my Network Monitoring Appliance we noticed a link in MRTG always under heavy load. On this link a lot of different traffic aggregates, so we decided to analyze of what quantities of protocols and therefore applications the cumulative traffic consists.

Ever since I moved to broadband I've been looking for a traffic monitor that will show me a breakdown of my usage for not just my current session, but for the entire month (as I am on a capped plan). It hasn't been easy finding one that works in Linux as most are for system administrators, not normal end-users.