Installing ntop network monitoring tool

ntop is a network traffic probe that shows the network usage, similar to what the popular top Unix command does. ntop is based on libpcap and it has been written in a portable way in order to virtually run on every Unix platform and on Win32 as well.

ntop users can use a a web browser (e.g. netscape) to navigate through ntop (that acts as a web server) traffic information and get a dump of the network status. In the latter case, ntop can be seen as a simple RMON-like agent with an embedded web interface.

1. Install required packages

apt-get install ntop


2. Set administrator password

ntop --set-admin-password


3. Configure ntop to use your correct network adapter if it’s not eth0 (optional)

dpkg-reconfigure ntop
> eth0 (or your network adapter)
> ntop


4. Start ntop

/etc/init.d/ntop start


Now you can access ntop web admin on a location similar to this one: http://192.168.1.100:3000. Just make sure you replace the IP address with your server IP address.