iftop to monitor traffic/bandwidth in SUSE/openSUSE

iftop is yet another free opensource tool to measure bandwidth utilization on the network interfaces on your systems or servers. As the name predicts, iftop is what “top” utility is for CPU usage measurement.

iftop can also run in promiscous mode and listen for all traffic on the subnet and can also listen for traffic on specified networks. iftop can be run in custom modes like disabling DNS name lookups, converting ports to service names, displaying results in Bytes etc.

For a detailed list of options run iftop with a “-h” arguement as follows:

opensuse11:~ # iftop -h
iftop: display bandwidth usage on an interface by host

Synopsis: iftop -h | [-npbBP] [-i interface] [-f filter code] [-N net/mask]

-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

iftop, version 0.17
copyright (c) 2002 Paul Warren <pdw@ex-parrot.com> and contributors

Install IFTOP in openSUSE

Click from the 1-click installer for your openSUSE build to download the YMP file and launch an autmatic installation process which should add the required repositories and download and install the required packages and dependencies.

openSUSE 11.1

openSUSE 11.0

openSUSE 10.3

There are also IFTOP 1-click installers for

SLES/SLED 10

SLES 9

Once the installation finishes succesfully, iftop should be installed under /usr/sbin

opensuse11:~ # which iftop
/usr/sbin/iftop

To have a quick preview of the bandwidth utilization, simply run “iftop” without any arguements:

opensuse11:~ # iftop

To run in a promiscous mode and listen for all traffic on the subnet, run with “-p” option

opensuse11:~ # iftop -p

As shown earlier, use “-h” arguement for all options.

Click here to visit the project home.