Monitor Network Bandwidth with Python

Question

I’m trying to build a python command-line program that monitors all available network interfaces in a machine. Similar to the popular (nload) which monitors the network bandwidth per interface, and (nethogs) commands which monitor network bandwidth per process I want to build a program that combine both options and also produce colored output.

nload

nethogs

My question is, how can I interact directly with the network interface from within python code? Is there a way to identity incoming/outgoing bandwidth speed? Is there a specific library that is recommended?

Thanks. However, there are similar libraries out there pcapy being one of them. What makes pypcap better. Can you shed some light on this matter — moeabdol
– moeabdol, Commented Mar 23, 2015 at 16:30
nethogs uses libpcap so I imagine you can get the same kind of functionality using it. — Padraic Cunningham
– Padraic Cunningham, Commented Mar 23, 2015 at 16:31

Klaus D. · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-23 16:35:10Z

1

Your question is highly OS depended. You will need other ways to access the interface statistics on different operating systems.

From your screenshot I guess that you might want to use Linux. In that case collecting the data from /sys/class/net/, /proc/net/, /proc/[pid]/net and /proc/sys/net would be a good start. There are tons of value to make statistics from.

For the terminal output you should have a look at curses.

answered Mar 23, 2015 at 16:35

Klaus D.

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2 Comments

moeabdol Over a year ago

You're absolutely right! Sorry I didn't clarify that in my question. I'm targeting unix-like machines (Linux and OSX). The paths you provided maybe valid for Linux systems but they are not available on OSX. Do you have any idea where I can locate the same on OSX? I also should note that I'm using the Urwid terminal interface library. It's a clean API that sits on top of ncurses for building terminal interfaces.

Klaus D. Over a year ago

On MacOS you have to use sysctl - somehow. I imaging a OS X experienced developer can tell you more…

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