How To Install Iftop Network Bandwidth Monitoring on Linux

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Iftop Network Bandwidth Monitoring on Linux. For those of you who didn’t know, iftop is a command-line tool that shows a list of active network connections between localhost and any remote host, sorted by their bandwidth usage. The list of top-ranking network connections (in terms of bandwidth usage) is periodically refreshed in a ncurses-based user interface.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Iftop Network Bandwidth Monitoring on a Linux server.

Install Iftop Network Bandwidth Monitoring on Linux

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

### CentOS ###
sudo yum clean all
sudo yum -y update

### Ubuntu ###
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Interface TOP (IFTOP) on Linux.

To install iftop on Ubuntu, Mint, or Debian:

sudo apt-get install iftop

To install iftop on CentOS:

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install iftop

Step 3. Using IFTOP.

iftop is very simple to use. Just type the iftop command on the terminal with root privileges to display the bandwidth usage of the first network interface. Press Q to exit from the iftop command output:

iftop

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Interface TOP (IFTOP). Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Iftop Network Bandwidth Monitoring on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official iftop website.