Real Time Interactive IP LAN Monitoring with IPTraf Tool

There are number of monitoring tools available. Moreover, i came across a IPTraf monitoring tool which i find very useful and it’s a simple tool to monitor Inbound and Outbound network traffic passing through interface.
IPTraf is an ncurses-based IP LAN monitoring tool (text-based) wherein we can monitor various connections like TCP, UDP, ICMP, non-IP counts and also Ethernet load information etc.
This article guides you on how to install IPTraf monitoring tool using YUM command.

Installing IPTraf

IPTraf is part of the Linux distribution and can be installed on RHEL, CentOS and Fedora server’s using yum command from terminal.

# yum install iptraf

Under Ubuntu, iptraf can be installed using Ubuntu Software Center or ‘apt-get’ method. For example, use the ‘apt-get‘ command to install it.

$ sudo apt-get install iptraf

IPTraf Usage

Once IPTraf installed, run the following command from the terminal to launch an ascii based menu interface that will allow you to view current IP traffic monitoring, General interface statistics, Detailed interface statistics, Statistical breakdowns, Filters and also provide some configure options where you can configure as per your need.
[root@tecmint ~]# iptraf

Similarly, you can also monitor TCP/UDP traffic on a specific interface, using the following command.

# iptraf -s eth0