NetWatch is a lightweight, keyboard-driven TUI application that gives you instant visibility into network traffic, active connections, interface health, live packet capture with deep protocol inspection, network topology mapping, connection timelines, and AI-powered network insights. Built with Rust for speed and low overhead.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Live interface monitoring — RX/TX rates, totals, and 60-second sparkline history for every network interface.
- Aggregate bandwidth graph — Full-width RX/TX sparklines across all active interfaces on the Dashboard.
- Active connections — Every open socket with process name, PID, protocol, state, and addresses (sortable).
- Network health — ICMP ping probes to gateway and DNS with RTT and packet loss.
- Latency heatmap — Color-coded RTT history for gateway and DNS on the Dashboard.
- Packet capture — Wireshark-style live capture with deep protocol decoding:
- DNS — Query names, types (A, AAAA, CNAME…), response codes.
- TLS — Handshake type, version, SNI hostname extraction.
- HTTP — Method, path, and response status lines.
- ICMP — Human-readable type/code (Echo Request, Dest Unreachable, TTL Exceeded…).
- ARP, DHCP, NTP, mDNS — Decoded with meaningful summaries.
- TCP payload — Readable text content extracted and displayed.
- 25+ service labels — Ports mapped to names (SSH, HTTPS, PostgreSQL, Redis…).
- TCP stream reassembly — Follow TCP/UDP conversations with text and hex views.
- TCP handshake timing — Automatic SYN→SYN-ACK→ACK latency measurement per connection.
- Display filters — Wireshark-style filter bar with protocol, IP, port, stream, text search, and/or/not combinators.
- BPF capture filters — Set Berkeley Packet Filter expressions applied at capture time.
- Expert info & coloring — Automatic severity classification (Error/Warn/Note/Chat) with color-coded rows.
- Packet bookmarks — Mark packets of interest, jump between bookmarks.
- PCAP export — Save captured packets (or filtered subset) to standard .pcap files.
- Protocol statistics — Protocol hierarchy table with packet counts, byte totals, and distribution bars.
- Handshake histogram — Latency distribution chart with min/avg/median/p95/max stats.
- GeoIP location — Background IP geolocation with country, city, and org display.
- Whois lookup — On-demand RDAP whois for any IP address.
- Connection → packet linking — Jump from a connection to filtered packet view.
- Help overlay — Full scrollable keybinding reference with filter syntax and expert legend.
- Network config — Default gateway, DNS servers, hostname at a glance.
- Cross-platform — Linux, macOS, and Windows with platform-specific collectors.
- Network topology — ASCII box diagram showing local machine, gateway, DNS servers, and top
- remote hosts with connection counts and health indicators.
- Connection timeline — Gantt-style bar chart of connection lifetimes, color-coded by state with adjustable time windows (30s to 1h).
- AI network insights — Real-time AI analysis via Ollama (llama3.2). Auto-analyzes every 15s, on-demand with a key. Detects security concerns, performance issues, and anomalies.
Website: github.com/matthart1983/netwatch
Support:
Developer: MIT License
License: Matt Hartley
NetWatch is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Network 'top' Tools | |
|---|---|
| ntopng | Web-based network traffic monitoring application with an open source version |
| NetHogs | Groups bandwidth by process |
| nload | Real time network traffic monitor for the text console |
| IPTraf-ng | Fork of IPTraf |
| iftop | Displays bandwidth usage on an interface by host |
| ntop | Network traffic probe that shows the network usage |
| IPTraf | Interactive Colourful IP LAN Monitor |
| socktop | Remote system monitor with a rich TUI |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |