[CentOS] Monitor Network Traffic

[Thomas Harold]

On 12/21/2009 9:08 AM, sadas sadas wrote:
 >   What is the best way to monitor the total incoming / outcoming network
 > traffic of CentOS server. I think that the solution is to monitor the
 > network interfaces and to send SNMP packets to remote server. But is it
 > possible?
 >

MRTG is the simplest to setup, but it only does graphs.  It's especially 
easy if you're trying to monitor the local host.  You'll need to also 
install the net-snmp and possibly net-snmp-utils packages.

Network monitoring solutions also do graphs (Cacti, Nagios, OpenNMS).

You can also try ntop.  It produces pretty graphs and also segregates 
network traffic by type/port.

In the past I've used Nagios & NTop.  Unfortunately, NTop was a bit of a 
CPU hog and I had stability issues with it that I never tracked down. 
So at the moment, we're mostly relying on MRTG to see traffic.

You can also (ab)use MRTG to graph things like CPU usage & CPU 
temperature, disk utilization, or anything else that you can query via a 
remote shell command or SNMP query.