Bandwidth Monitor NG (bwm-ng) is a small and simple console-based live network and disk io bandwidth monitor for Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and others. There is no fancy GUI or interfaces simple console utility which installs and runs flawlessly showing live stats of your Network or Disk I/O stats.
Features include
support for /proc/net/dev, netstat, getifaddr, sysctl, kstat for Network Monitoring
support for /proc/diskstats /proc/partitions, IOKit, devstat and libstatgrab for Disk I/O Monitoring
Support for unlimited number of Network interfaces/devices
Dynamic Addition and Deletion of interfaces/devices to the list
Whitelist and blacklist of interfaces/devices
Output formats of KB/s, Kb/s, packets, errors, average, max and total sum
Output in curses, plain console, CSV or HTML
Install bwm-ng
Bandwidth monitor NG can quickly be built from source. Download bwm-ng from here or from a terminal window as follows:
opensuse11:~ # wget http://www.gropp.org/bwm-ng/bwm-ng-0.6.tar.gz
Unzip & Untar bwm-ng
opensuse11:~ # tar -zxvf bwm-ng-0.6.tar.gz
Install GCC and Make utility
If you do not already have the GCC compiler and the make utility then install as follows. If already installed then you can skip this step.
opensuse11:~ # yast2 -i gcc make
Now, change directory to the newly created bwm-ng directory and run configure.
opensuse11:~ # cd bwm-ng-0.6
opensuse11:~/bwm-ng-0.6 # ./configure
Compile & Install
Now, compile and install bwm-ng as follows:
opensuse11:~/bwm-ng-0.6 # make && make install
This should install bwm-ng under /usr/local/bin/bwm-ng
opensuse11:~ # which bwm-ng
/usr/local/bin/bwm-ng
Run bwm-ng
To see the stats of all the interfaces (including Wireless interfaces) on the system simply run bwm-ng without any arguements. At anytime press <CTRL+C> to stop monitoring the stats.
opensuse11:~ # bwm-ng
To see stats on a specific interface,
opensuse11:~ # bwm-ng -I wlan0
To check Disk I/O stats,
opensuse11:~ # bwm-ng -i disk
For more options, run bwm-ng with “-h” arguement to show the options
opensuse:~/bwm-ng-0.6 # bwm-ng -h
Bandwidth Monitor NG (bwm-ng) v0.6
Copyright (C) 2004-2007 Volker Gropp <bwmng@gropp.org>
USAGE: bwm-ng [OPTION] … [CONFIGFILE]
displays current ethernet interfaces statsOptions:
-t, –timeout <msec> displays stats every <msec> (1msec = 1/1000sec)
default: 500
-d, –dynamic [value] show values dynamicly (Byte KB or MB)
-a, –allif [mode] where mode is one of:
0=show only up (and selected) interfaces
1=show all up interfaces (default)
2=show all and down interfaces
-I, –interfaces <list> show only interfaces in <list> (comma seperated), or
if list is prefaced with % show all but interfaces
in list
-S, –sumhidden [value] count hidden interfaces for total
-A, –avglength <sec> sets the span of average stats (Default 30s)
-D, –daemon [value] fork into background and daemonize
-h, –help displays this help
-V, –version print version infoInput:
-i, –input <method> input method, one of: proc netstat disk
-f, –procfile <file> filename to read raw data from. (/proc/net/dev)
–diskstatsfile <file> filename to read diskstats (Linux 2.6+) from. (/proc/diskstats)
–partitionsfile <file> filename to read diskstats (Linux 2.4) from. (/proc/partitions)Output:
-o, –output <method> output method, one of:
plain, csv, html
-u, –unit <value> unit to show. one of bytes, bits, packets, errors
-T, –type <value> type of stats. one of rate, max, sum, avg
-C, –csvchar <char> delimiter for csv
-F, –outfile <file> output file for csv and html (default stdout)
-R, –htmlrefresh <num> meta refresh for html output
-H, –htmlheader show <html> and <meta> frame for html output
-c, –count <num> number of query/output for plain & csv
-N, –ansiout disable ansi codes for plain output
(ie 1 for one single output)
A simple but useful tool when trying to troubleshoot network problems or when there is a Disk I/O performance issue. Click here to visit the project homepage.