Bandwidth Monitoring with NTop (Network Top)
NTop is a network traffic probe that shows the network usage, similar to what the popular top Unix command does. ntop is based on libpcap and it has been written in a portable way in order to virtually run on every Unix platform and on Win32 as well.
NTop users can use a a web browser (e.g. firefox, netscape) to navigate through ntop (that acts as a web server) traffic information and get a dump of the network status. In the latter case, ntop can be seen as a simple RMON-like agent with an embedded web interface.
The use of:
- a web interface
- limited configuration and administration via the web interface
- reduced CPU and memory usage (they vary according to network size and traffic)
This document will help in installation and configuration of NTOP on Centos, I am assuming that you have installed Centos 5 with all necessary packages but minimal installation is preferred.
