kallasoft

Are you running multiple servers, and having a hard time tracking where all your bandwidth is going? Maybe you just want a quick view of how efficient your new music streaming app? You are in luck, there is a useful little utility called constat that can help track down rogue bandwidth hogs.

The utility gives many options allowing you to display packets sent and received on one, multiple, or all devices attached to your system. It does offer logging capabilities, but I find it useful as a quick standalone app. The most useful–and key–feature is constat’s ability to output packets sent and received in terms of kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes. A script savvy administrator might also find additional uses for constat’s ability to view the socket table, available protocols, and the aforementioned packet information for each device. To get up and running with constat, grab the source from here and run the standard configure, make, make install steps.

While there are other utilities to grab the same information in a standard linux distro, constat is a lightweight utility that offers a quick peek at your bandwidth usage.