Day: 12 April 2020

Linux network monitoring

I use gkrellm as my linux monitoring app. I have used it since I started but something I miss is I would like to know what app and destination IPs are causing a traffic spike in my laptop.

Searching a bit a come up with this page with several tools:

18 commands to monitor network bandwidth on Linux server

Based on my requirement, it seems I need two apps.

  • nethogs: For finding out the process triggering the traffic spike
  • pktstat: For finding out the IPs involved.

Now it is case of remembering the commands 🙂 But as far as I have tested. It seems they can do the job.

To cloud or not to cloud

This is nothing new. But I was reading an article about it and was a good refresh:

https://lwn.net/Articles/748106/

The article is a couple of years old but I think it is still relevant. Most people I know they have their infrastructure in the cloud. In my current job we are still based on bare metal due to the nature of our business but some years ago we were in that point when deciding what to do with our CI/CD environment. I wasnt involved in that decision (only in the deployment/implementation). Our capex was higher but long term (3y), it was cheaper to build in premise than in the cloud. I agree with the article that when you dont know how things are going to grow, scale requirements, etc cloud is the best choice. Once you ran pass the start-up phase, you should reconsider the position.