How to install Bmon – real-time bandwidth monitoring tool for linux

Bmon is a portable real-time bandwidth monitor and rate estimator. It supports various input methods for different architectures. Various output modes exist, including an interactive curses interface, lightweight HTML output, and simple ASCII output. Statistics may be distributed over a network using multicast or unicast and collected at some point to generate a summary of statistics for a set of nodes.

Install Bmon on Debian/Ubuntu linux

For Debian/Ubuntu systems type following command in a terminal:

$ sudo apt-get install bmon

Here are the steps to install bmon from source code:
Download the latest version from Carisma website

Download the latest version from Carisma website

$ wget http://www.carisma.slowglass.com/~tgr/bmon/files/bmon-3.1.tar.gz

Extract it

$ tar zxfv bmon-3.1.tar.gz

Go the the extracted folder

$ cd bmon-3.1

Compile and install bmon

$ ./configure

$ make

$ sudo make install

How to use bmon

Bmon is an console based tool, open a terminal and enter the command “bmon” and you should see the following output:

bmon example

As shown, it lists all the available interfaces. At the bottom, you will find two options to open graph and detailed output by clicking g and d respectively. If done, the output should look like this:

bmon

To get some help how to operate bmon, press “?“button:

bmon help screen

Bmon can be a handy tool for debugging and monitor bandwidth in real-time mode. For more features, you might want to take a look at its man page:

$ man bmon

or 

bmon --help