Monitoring

We all are excited about saving energy and serving the environment but we don't realize that we can start from the things right beside us, for example, the computer. There are a lot of things going on in a computer which keeps consuming power. Based upon the load, the consumption could be high or low, but even when you think that your computer is doing nothing, there could be a hundred of things going on(some could be useless) that consume/waste energy. This specially sucks when your laptop is on battery power.

So, I think my search for a live network bandwidth monitor finally ended with this screenlet, netmonitor. Bmon and vnstat were working fine, but I was looking for something that can be present all the time on the screen without hindering other apps. A Screenlet was indeed the best option to go for.

One of the peculiar things about linuxers is that we love managing our system and we like doing it so much that we come up with some of the most amazing, innovative and fun tools to ease the job. I am not talking about some cool widget here, its a virtual stripper, named "hot-babe". The harder your system's processor works the more she strips .

So, I have already been using vnstat monitoring tool to keep a track of my Internet usage stats for some time. Recently, I started looking for a real time network bandwidth monitoring tool. Vnstat's live" mode works fine, but while looking for something better I came across bmon, which is actually a specialised console-based real time bandwidth monitoring app.

A few days ago, I wrote about monitoring your system's network activity on linux, a command line approach. Someone also commented about a graphical tool available to monitor various network connections on your system, netactview. So, here is its small review.

A few days ago, I got the last month's Internet Bill. And due to overusage I had to pay 4 times the usual. That's when I realized that I definitely need to keep a check on my Internet usage. Vnstat is a simple console based tool built for such purposes. It keeps a log of the network traffic for the selected interface(s). It can show the usage stats in various formats (daily, monthly even live mode is available). It has proved to be a real life(actually money  ) saver for me.