Bmon – real-time bandwidth monitoring tool for linux

Photo of author

By rasho

Bmon is a portable real-time bandwidth monitor and rate estimator. It supports various input methods for different architectures. Various output modes exist, including an interactive curses interface, lightweight HTML output, and simple ASCII output. Statistics may be distributed over a network using multicast or unicast and collected at some point to generate a summary of statistics for a set of nodes.

Install Bmon on Debian/Ubuntu linux

For Debian/Ubuntu systems type following command in a terminal:

$ sudo apt-get install bmon

Install Bmon from source code

Here are the steps to install bmon from source code:
Download the latest version from Carisma website

$ wget http://www.carisma.slowglass.com/~tgr/bmon/files/bmon-3.1.tar.gz

Extract it

$ tar zxfv bmon-3.1.tar.gz

Go the the extracted folder

$ cd bmon-3.1

Compile and install bmon

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

How to use bmon

Bmon is an console based tool, open a terminal and enter the commandbmon” and you should see the following output:
[ads]

bmon example
bmon example

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:

bmon
bmon

To get some help how to operate bmon, press “?“button:

bmon help screen
bmon help screen

Bmon can be a handy tool for debugging and monitor bandwidth in real-time mode. For more features, you might want to take a look at its man page:

$ man bmon
or
bmon --help

Leave a Comment