Monitoring Network Activity
Network Speedometer
© Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
With bandwhich, you can quickly see the current network load on your computer.
If you're looking for way to monitor network activity, the bandwhich command-line utility can provide you with a clear-cut overview of the traffic on a local or remote computer. It shows you the current network access, the network load caused by this access, and the associated processes.
To use bandwhich, you will need administrative rights; you will also need an SSH connection in a terminal window if you plan to launch the utility on a remote computer. On bandwhich's GitHub page [1], you can download a 64-bit binary for Linux, Android, macOS, or Windows, as well as the source code. For this article, I used version 0.23.1. Further development is currently on hold while the developers fix bugs and security issues [2].
Getting Started
If you call up bandwhich without any options, you'll see the screen in Figure 1. The program does not win any awards for frugal use of screen space. To see all the output columns, you may need to set a smaller font for the terminal and toggle the terminal window to full-screen mode. The output includes information about the network devices involved and the total volume of incoming and outgoing data. For the sake of clarity, bandwhich does not display DNS queries.
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