Q: How to monitor uplink and downlink speed on Ubuntu CLI in realtime?

A: bmon -i netlink:notc

When you download or upload a bulky file or open a stream, you probably want to monitor network speed in realtime. For example, there are several Docker containers on my machine and every once in a while I have several hundred of Mb come and go, and I want to visualise it.

bmon gives you the possibility to watch network speed by interface, or by container, if you use Docker. Just try:

apt-get install bmon
bmon

bmon interface

The problem I encountered with bmon was related to its crash with Segmentation fault (core dumped) error. Luckily, this way of calling bmon helps:

bmon -i netlink:notc