How to Measure Internet Consumption from Linux Terminal

Nbwmon is a ncurses based bandwidth monitor tool that can be used to get detailed information like, transmitted and received traffic for a network interface. Nbwmon comes with lots of features some of them are listed below:

1. Supports Ethernet, Wireless and Mobile Internet connections.
2. Display current, average and maximum upload and download speed.
3. Print total traffic received and transmitted.
4. Detect active interface automatically.
5. Support for multiple units.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to install Nbwmon on Ubuntu operating system. We will also see some practical example along with screenshots.

Requirements

• Ubuntu 14.04 desktop or later install on your system.
• A normal user with sudo privileges.

Install Nbwmon

First, you will need to download the Nbwmon binary package from SourceForge. If your system is 64-bit then you can download it with the following command:

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wget https://ufpr.dl.sourceforge.net/project/linuxfreedomfor/Linux/nbwmon%20bin/64bit/nbwmon

If your system is 32-bit then you can download it with the following command:

wget https://ufpr.dl.sourceforge.net/project/linuxfreedomfor/Linux/nbwmon%20bin/32bit/nbwmon

After downloading Nbwmon, copy the downloaded binary file to the /usr/bin/ directory:

sudo cp nbwmon /usr/bin/

Next, give executable permission to the file with the following command:

sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/nbwmon

Working with Nbwmon

To display the list of all available options with Nbwmon, run the following command:

nbwmon --h

You should see the following output:

usage: nbwmon [options]

-h    help
-v    version
-n    no colors
-s    use SI units
-u    unified graphmax

-i     network interface
-d       redraw delay
-l         fixed graph height

If you want to monitor your current network interface eth0 and update them every 5 seconds, run the following command

nbwmon -i eth0 -d 5

You should see the output in the following image:

If you want to monitor your wireless network interface and update them every 1 second, run the following command:

nbwmon -i wlan0 -d 1

You should see the output in the following image:

Uninstall Nbwmon

If you want to uninstall Nbwmon from your system, simply run the following command:

sudo rm -rf /usr/bin/nbwmon

Conclusion

In the above article, we have learned how to install Nbwmon on Ubuntu. We have also learned how to use Nbwmon with specific options. I hope you have now enough knowledge to install and use Nbwmon on Ubuntu.