system and network monitors in terminal

[Digit]

(was tempted to call this thread, "how to live without conky"... but i suppose there's no harm (and some benefit) in having these whilst continuing to use conky, if you cant break that addiction.  ~could maybe even have some of these piped through your conky)

so, lets just give a very brief intro to these...
(and as always, if you know of others, please share)

network and bandwidth monitors:
nmon*
jnettop
nettop
iptraf
bmon
bwm-ng
(there's at least two others i've known of in the past, but am failing at the moment to recall)

process and system resources monitors:
atop*
top
htop
free
mon

*atop is special, having network capabilities too.
*nmon is special, having system resource capabilities too.
** some others are like this in some respects too.

iptraf
needs to be run as root.
lots of capabilities/modes.
using it's first mode from the list you're greeted with after launching and pressing any key, if you have lots and lots of different connections, this might generally not be so useful as an at-a-glance tool, but it still has many merits, and if you want to whittle things down, find out what ip are connecting to your box, this is one of the best.
the second mode is a simpler bandwidth monitor, much like many of the rest in this roundup.
i'll leave you to explore the other features.

jnettop
needs to be run as root.
another great ip connections monitor.  handy to see which ip connection is chewing up the bandwidth.  several other features too, i'm sure.

nettop
needs to be run as root.
alas, not available in debian repo. (so i suppose i wont bother with further elaboration for this community).

nmon
i dont know where to begin describing this one to you.  when i think of it, i think of it as "network monitor" and generally just press n upon starting it... but i guess that n stands for ncurses, since most of the options to press upon launch will monitor other non-network things.  really quite cool.  rather elegant n pretty, in a clean minimal way too (esp if run in a terminal capable of high colour ~ i dont remember setting any of my 16 colour to that shade). 
~ suggestion... open lots of them in a terminal split up with dvtm, tmux, or screen(with horizontal splits plugin), and arrange to your own preference.     ... maybe even put them in a tilda instance, or yeahconsole, or gnome-terminal, or yakuake, or some keybound toggle-view capability of your window manager (like scratchpads in xmonad)...  sry, rambling

bmon
you dont want to have to be looking at your bandwidth monitor all the time, so it's nice to have a graph, to see where the spikes have just been.   also, take a quick look at it's short man page, particularly the inputs and outputs... see? handy.

bwm
oops, i keep forgetting the -ng.  it's bwm-ng.  beautiful, simple, just what you want in a bandwidth monitor.    again, check out the man page... this has other tricks up it's sleeve... see, not just for network bandwidth.   check out, for example. "bwm-ng -i disk"


atop
in the first second after running this, it may give you an error that looks like it's not going to run... but then, up it springs, with numbers galore!  information overload!  right?    lots to explore.     no seriously... lots.  ^_^  even a 'quick' scroll through its man page suggests there's a lot going on.

top
the classic precursor inspiration to htop.  if you're used to htop, this one might seem far less interactive to begin with, but keep investigating, it still has a few tricks up its sleeve.

htop
if you've not heard of htop, i wonder what rock you've been under.  ... was the rock called windows?  welcome to the free world.     this one needs no introduction or explanation, surely.  there's a reason so many distros bundle it ootb.

free
just for swap and ram (and buffers and cache), you might not think of free as much of a system monitor like the others, since it doesnt update, right?   try this:

Code Select Expand

free -s 2(see "man free")

mon
ok, i admit, i dont know much about simple mon yet.  it almost looks like the "ed" of system monitors... but i bet it can be put to excellent use in the right hands, with the right pipes.


now... please tell me... what did i miss out?
what other monitors are there out there that you can run in a terminal?
what other pertinent features and capabilities did i neglect to highlight in any of these?

[VastOne]

Great info and explanations/suggestions savant...

Well done... I was in need of this to sniff out some network issues, thank you!

R&R time now?

[Digit]

okies.  now i r&r.. &r&r&r&r.  XD

[statmonkey]

Wow

What a great resource.  I want to run them all - at once - now!

Thanks Digit