EtherApe

What EtherApe is

EtherApe is a free, open-source graphical network monitor for Linux. It depicts hosts and their connections, resizing them according to traffic volume and using color to indicate the most-used protocol. Users can inspect activity at network, end-to-end IP, or port-to-port TCP level and narrow the display with filters written in pcap syntax. EtherApe captures live traffic or reads tcpdump capture files. Live capture supports Ethernet, FDDI, PPP, SLIP, WLAN, and other encapsulated formats, including Linux cooked and PPI. Node and protocol summary dialogs provide statistics, and node statistics can be exported as XML or JSON. Name resolution uses standard libc functions, with optional ARES resolver integration. The monitor sees traffic physically passing its network card. On switched networks, that generally limits visibility to local or broadcast traffic unless traffic is mirrored to its port or the machine is placed at a gateway. Binary distributions are available for Linux only. The project lists end users, desktop users, and system administrators as its audience and provides bug reporting, mailing lists, and discussion forums.