Download and install iftop

Iftop is available in the official software repositories of Debian/Ubuntu Linux, you can install it using apt command as shown.

$ apt install iftop

On RHEL/CentOS, you need to enable the EPEL repository, and then install it as follows.

# yum install epel-release
# yum install  iftop

Other Linux distributions, can download iftop source package using wget command and compile it from source as shown.

# wget http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/iftop/download/iftop-0.17.tar.gz
# tar -zxvf iftop-0.17.tar.gz
# cd iftop-0.17
# ./configure
# make
# make install

Run iftop

Once installation is done, go to your console and run the iftop command without any arguments to view bandwidth usage of default interface, as shown in the screen shot below.

Without additional parameters, iftop will monitor all the inbound and outbound traffic on the default network interface. eg: eth0.

To monitor a different network interface, e.g: eth0 , you would need to pass the interface name to the iftop command using the -i parameter:

# iftop -i eth0

To disable hostname lookups, use the -n flag.

# iftop -n  eth0

To turn on port display, use the -P switch.

# sudo iftop -P eth0

This concludes our tutorial. For more information on how to use iftop, please refer to iftop’s website.

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