Desktop Network Traffic Monitor for Ubuntu Fossa

Bandwidth monitor on your system tray desktop UI gives us lots of insight

Geek Level: medium

Have you ever wondered, when you are working , or downloading or installing from internet — what is the network doing? Is it currently downloading or uploading? how much bandwidth used?

Yes of course you can use terminal application like bmon or vnstat, but here I am talking about dedicated system tray information that you can see instantly.

That my friend, with the top indicator showing how much download and upload speed, will be useful in many occasions, because we don’t have to guess our network status and don’t have to execute other application just to check.

Apparently it was not easy to found application that can do this. Until I finally found “Simple Net Speed”. It is not a dedicated application, instead it is an extension on top of Gnome Desktop UI. By default, Ubuntu installation has Gnome UI xwindow, therefore if you didn’t change the default xwindow, you can have this extension easily.

First we need to enable the extension by installing:

sudo apt install gnome-shell-extensions

After done, theoretically you only need to logout and re-login again. But somehow in my case it didn’t work, that I had to reboot the Ubuntu. Afterwards we will have new program called “Extensions”.

You can use Extensions and Tweaks to modify some desktop options.

Next we will need to install Firefox Extension. (Sorry guys, I am firefox user 😆 but there should be similar extension for Chrome)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gnome-shell-integration/

After installing to firefox, we can now go to https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1085/simple-net-speed/ and enable that plugin for our Gnome.

And that’s all. You can click the system tray to change the format i.e. kbit, kByte, etc…

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Thanks for reading 🍺