Bmon, a real-time Bandwidth monitoring tool

So, I have already been using vnstat monitoring tool to keep a track of my Internet usage stats for some time. Recently, I started looking for a real time network bandwidth monitoring tool. Vnstat's live" mode works fine, but while looking for something better I came across bmon, which is actually a specialised console-based real time bandwidth monitoring app.

Install bmon

For Ubuntu or Debian systems, either click this link or run the following command in a terminal

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install bmon

I couldn't find it in Fedora repos .

Since, this is an console based tool, open a terminal and enter the command "bmon" and you should see the following output

As shown, it lists all the available interfaces. At the bottom, you will find two options to open graph and detailed output by clicking g and d respectively. If done, the output should look like this

As you can see, the tool is pretty good for real time monitoring but unfortunately the project is probably dead now. The last major release of this software was Version 2.0.1 released in October of 2004, which is the available version in Lucid's repo. So, I am guessing that the project is no longer under development.

Well, before I end you might be interested in knowing that Bmon is not just about the small screen shown above. It is actually known for sharing these stats in a variety of ways. I just used one of them - throwing the output in HTML files. So, if you keep those files somewhere in your /var/www directory, the data could be easily accessed remotely through the webserver.

You can do this by simply running this command in a terminal

[shredder12]$ bmon -O html:path=<path_to_dir>

Here is a screenshot of the html output

For more features, you might want to take a look at its man page. I am pretty sure better network monitoring applications would have been released in past 6 years, but as far as simple bandwidth monitoring goes, bmon is good.

I will keep looking for better monitoring tools, preferably graphical this time. If you use or have any in mind, do let me know.