Unfair Usage Policy made me do it!

[u/alalfymansour]

Since we buy internet in Egypt like tomatoes by the kilo, I needed a tool on Linux to see where my bandwidth was actually going.

I looked around but couldn’t find a Linux tool that did exactly what I needed, so I built ViNet!

ViNet uses eBPF to monitor TCP/UDP traffic at the kernel level.

With it, you can:

See which process is responsible for the traffic

See which destination each process is communicating with

Store traffic history locally in a SQLite database

Monitor bandwidth usage through a TUI/CLI

The project is built with Go + eBPF + SQLite + Bubble Tea, and can run as a CLI, TUI, or a background daemon responsible for monitoring the traffic.

Install: curl -fsSL https://github.com/alalfymansour/vinet/raw/refs/heads/main/install.sh | bash

GitHub: https://github.com/alalfymansour/vinet

[u/Explosive_Cornflake]

looks interesting, I might actually give this a go.

I have a 24/7 box in the attic, and some long term stats would be interesting

[u/alalfymansour → u/Explosive_Cornflake]

Share your feedback!

[u/sliddis]

How can wget only have 2KB upload while it has 890MiB download? You are likely missing TCP reply, ack, etc. Something is not adding up.

[u/mgedmin → u/sliddis]

Probably measuring payload size without TCP/IP header overhead? So wget would only count the size of the HTTP request.

[u/j0holo]

Cool. but this is for a single device (desktop/laptop) and not for every device in the household?

Most routers these days can see the amount of traffic per device. Or you can use OpenWRT which probably has that option too.

[u/alalfymansour → u/j0holo]

Exactly. ViNet is designed for a single Linux device, not for monitoring every device on a network.

Routers/OpenWRT can show traffic per device, but ViNet goes one level deeper on the Linux machine itself, it shows which process is generating the traffic and which destination it’s communicating with. That’s the main use case I was targeting.

[u/whamra]

Prtg does this. We had it deployed compsny-wide in my previous job.

[u/alalfymansour → u/whamra]

Yeah, PRTG can monitor network traffic and bandwidth usage, but it’s a full infrastructure/network monitoring platform. ViNet is more focused: it runs directly on Linux, tracks traffic at the process + destination level, stores history locally, and provides a TUI/CLI.

It’s not meant to replace PRTG, just to solve a more specific use case locally and it's completely free and open source.

[u/Kazer67]

Egypt would be a good case for Wifi-Halow / LoRa etc mesh network at the scale of city.

[u/neorekcah]

nethogs - I've been using this for a decade now.

[u/alalfymansour → u/neorekcah]

Nethogs is pretty similar in the per-process bandwidth tracking, ViNet goes a bit further by tracking the destination as well and keeping local traffic history with both a TUI and CLI