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
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:
1 | sudo dnf install nload |
Debian/Ubuntu:
1 | 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:
1 | 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
If you want to monitor the bandwidth of just a single adapter, that command is actually really simple – it’s just:
1 | nload <adapter_name> |
For example, and using an an oft used Linux adapter name:
1 | nload eth0 |
That’s about it, other than learning how to close the application. That may not be obvious to everyone, you can use
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!
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