nload – Monitor bandwidth usage on Linux

I. What is Nload?

nload  is a tool on Linux to monitor network traffic and bandwidth usage in real time. It helps you to monitor IN(incoming) and OUT(outgoing) traffic using graphs and provides a lot of additional information such as total amount of data transferred and average/minimum/minimum network usage multi.

II. Instructions for installing nload on a Linux server

To install nload on a Linux server , we follow these 2 steps.

Step 1: SSH into your Linux server

First we need  SSH or access  your VPS  or server with  root privileges  first.

After successfully  SSH  , we continue with step 2 to execute the nload installation commands.

Step 2: Execute the nload installation command on the Linux server

nload  can be easily installed by enabling the EPEL archive library on a CentOS or RHEL based system using the following commands.

-------- On CentOS and RHEL servers --------
yum install epel-release -y
yum install nload -y

-------- On Fedora 22+ server --------
dnf install nload

On Debian or Ubuntu servers , nload can be installed from the default system repositories with the following command.

sudo apt install nload	

Below is a picture when I install nload on CentOS .

III. User manual nload

1. Launch nload

When you launch nload with the command , you can switch between network cards by pressing the left or right nload  arrow keys .

nload
or
nload eth0

Because my server only has 1 network card in use, I use the command directly nloadto view information.

2. Shortcuts when using nload

After launching nload, you can use the following shortcuts:

• Use left  and  right arrow   keys or  Enter/Tab key  to switch screen to next network card or use nload -m to view multiple cards at once.
• Use  F2  to bring up the options window.
• Use  F5  to save the current settings to the user’s configuration file.
• Use  F6  to reload settings from configuration files.
• Use  q  or  Ctrl + C  to exit nload .

To display multiple network cards at the same time and not display traffic graphs, please use the option  -m. And use the arrow keys to switch between as many devices as shown on the screen:

nload -m

Use  -aand interval to set the length in seconds of the average result (default is  300 ), for example you want to calculate the average bandwidth in 400 seconds then use the following command:

nload -a 400

Options -t and screen refresh interval in milliseconds (default value is  500 ). Note that specifying a refresh interval shorter than  100  milliseconds will result in inaccurate traffic calculations:

nload -ma 400 -t 600

You can specify the network card that you need to monitor with the following command.

nload devices device_name

Please replace device_name it with the name of your network card. To see the list of network cards of the server, you just need to use the command

lshw -class network -short

Hopefully with this article, you will be able to easily monitor server traffic, thereby making administrative work a lot easier.