In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nethogs on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, methods is a small ‘net top’ tool. Instead of breaking the traffic down per protocol or per subnet, as most tools do, it groups bandwidth by process. It is feature-rich, supports both IPv4 and IPv6, and in my opinion, is the best utility when you want to identify programs that are consuming all your bandwidth on your Linux machine.
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 the step-by-step installation of the Nethogs monitoring network traffic on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint or elementary OS.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- An active internet connection. You’ll need an internet connection to download the necessary packages and dependencies for Nethogs.
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install Nethogs on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa
Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade sudo apt install build-essential libncurses5-dev libpcap-dev
Step 2. Installing Nethogs on Ubuntu 20.04.
Now run the following command Nethogs to your Ubuntu system:
sudo apt install nethogs
To check whether Nethogs is working, run the following command below:
nethogs -V
Step 3. Using Nethogs on Ubuntu.
Once successfully installed, you’re ready to monitor your network traffic with Nethogs. Simply run it with root permissions as follows:
sudo nethogs
For example to indicate that every 10 seconds the monitoring should be refreshed:
sudo nethogs -d 10
Another useful thing to do is to specify which network interface to monitor:
sudo nethogs -d 10 eth1
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Nethogs. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Nethogs monitoring network traffic on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Nethogs website.
