How To Monitor Network Activity For Troubleshooting And Security

Whether you are troubleshooting a network issue or verifying the security of your network, monitoring network activity is crucial to maintaining a secure Linux system. Learn about multiple great methods for monitoring network activity on a Linux system in this LinuxConfig tutorial.

There are many reasons why you may want to monitor the network activity on your Linux system. You may be troubleshooting a network issue, you may want to check to make sure that there are no malicious applications creating suspicious network activity, or you may simply want to know if any processes are phoning home. Whatever the reason, here are a few methods to see which processes on your system are engaged in network activity and who they are communicating with.

In this tutorial you will learn:

• How to monitor network connections and listening services with netstat
• How to monitor network connections and listening services with lsof
• How to monitor network connections and listening services with ifconfig
• What tools you can use to examine the data being sent over the network