Monitor Bandwidth With nload

Today’s article should be fairly quick and simple, as we learn to monitor bandwidth with nload. It’s a handy tool that’s generally available across the many distros and is something you might find useful in your daily Linux journey.

You may also recall this article:

‘vnStat’ A Tool For Monitoring Your Bandwidth Usage

Well, today we’ll be learning how to monitor bandwidth with nload. You’ll find that nload has some visual similarities with vnStat – but nload doesn’t do logging. It’s a way to monitor your bandwidth in real time and, of course, in the terminal!

We do lots of fun stuff in the terminal! I didn’t actually expect so many articles to be terminal-based when I first started the site. Maybe I just hate taking screenshots?!?

Anyhow, this article will be published on a Sunday. It’s a weekend article, so it’s we can have a little fun with it. I’ll even keep it relatively short. You’re welcome!

So then, let’s just jump into the article…

Monitor Bandwidth With nload:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, let’s go ahead and install nload. It should be in your default repositories, so it’d be installed with something like:

Fedora:

sudo dnf install nload

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install nload

Etc… Fill in the above for your distro. You’ll find that nload defines itself as:

nload – displays the current network usage

With nload installed, you can simply start it with:

nload

That will load all of your network adapters and you use your arrow keys to navigate between the network adapters. It should automatically find all your network adapters, so you don’t need to configure it to do so.

If you want to see the nload options available, press F2 where you’ll find you have some options available, including how long it takes for the application to find the averages.

If you want to monitor the bandwidth of just a single adapter, that command is actually really simple – it’s just:

nload <adapter_name>

For example, and using an an oft used Linux adapter name:

nload eth0

That’s about it, other than learning how to close the application. That may not be obvious to everyone, you can use Q or you can press CTRL + C to close out nload.

Closure:

And that is it, really. The article doesn’t really need more details to show you how to monitor bandwidth with nload. It’s quite a simple program and the output is entirely intuitive for even a rank Linux beginner. Enjoy your weekend!

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.