Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to analyze network traffic in real-time thanks to iptraf-ng. Let’s go.
iptraf-ng is a console-based network statistic monitoring utility. Thanks to it, you will be able to get useful information from the network. It should be noted that, iptraf-ng is a fork of iptraf and is present in many Linux distributions. The ncurses text-based user interface makes it easy to configure and to use this tool.
It returns such information as:
- Current TCP connections
- UDP, ICMP, OSPF, and other types of IP packets
- Packet and byte counts on TCP connections
- IP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, non-IP, and other packet and byte counts
- TCP/UDP counts by ports
- Packet counts by packet sizes
IPTraf-ng works on Ethernet, FDDI, PLIP, loopback, and SLIP/PPP interfaces. Also supports GRE-over-IP tunnels, 802.1ad and QinQ VLAN, and SIT tunnels.
It is simple to use and manipulate, let’s go for it.
Installing iptraf-ng on Linux
iptraf-ng is present in many Linux distributions. Thanks to its official repositories, this tool can be installed without too many problems.
So, open a terminal or connect via SSH and update your distribution
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
# or
sudo dnf update
# or
sudo zypper up
# or
sudo pacman -Syu
And then you can install it from the official repositories. In the case of Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives.
sudo apt install iptraf-ng
![Install iptraf-ng on Linux](https://unixcop.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1-12.png)
And with this, we will have it installed.
Using iptraf-ng on Linux
To use it, just run its command with root privileges.
sudo iptraf-ng
You will see a screen like this
![iptraf-ng main menu](https://unixcop.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/2-6.png)
There you will be able to choose the execution mode. For example, you can choose the first option to monitor the network traffic
![Interfaces to listen](https://unixcop.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/3-3.png)
Finally, you will see the report.
![Using Iptraf-ng](https://unixcop.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/4-2.png)
Conclusion
The network is an important issue to consider when using an operating system on a server. So, these tools come to the aid of all sysadmins.