Tell me more ×
Server Fault is a question and answer site for professional system and network administrators. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 0 down vote favorite

I'm trying to analyze the performance of an application running on Linux. I use a combination of vmstat/iostat/top to see if the machine is disk I/O bound or CPU bound, but I'm not sure what utility to use to monitor network usage. Specifically, I'd like to know if the machine's network pipe is maxed out. What utility should I use?

share|improve this question

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

I typically use the iptraf utility for this purpose. Many distributions have this packaged but do not install it by default.

Additionally, historical graphing such as that which is created by Cacti is useful.

share|improve this answer
netstat can list bandwidth usage, errors, restarts etc. but can be cumbersome. – symcbean Jul 8 '10 at 14:27
up vote 1 down vote

Give a look at iftop.
If you want to monitor network performance, you can setup snmp and monitor snmp stats.
Or you could install ntop and have all the information you need

share|improve this answer
ntop's a good one. It's part of my standard toolkit on firewalls and routers. – Warner Jul 8 '10 at 14:32
On routers/firewalls i'd install fprobe to export netflow statistics, instead of Ntop – Pier Jul 8 '10 at 14:45
Interesting. What Open Source tool do you use as the collector? – Warner Jul 8 '10 at 14:53
Ntop on another server ;) – Pier Jul 8 '10 at 15:00
haha, nice. Thanks. That's a good idea, I think I'll implement that. – Warner Jul 8 '10 at 15:02

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.