akshaykmr/hogwatch

A bandwidth monitor that shows per process network transfer(Alpha)

Project is not maintained

Hackernews thread

I built this project for my college assignment. It was my first python project/package for that matter. I am really overwhelmed by the response, however the application is still in early stages.

Here are some things that need to be fixed/added for eg.

• fix some bugs on frontend
  • sort on transfer_amount instead
  • fix error #15 on switching charts
• filter by device such as wlan,eth0 (frontend ui)
• show more details such as pid,user with improved ui (possible for linux)
• store history for restarts
• proper packaging
• unit tests

this project was made quickly; and had to workaround certain limitations using ineffecient techniques.

• for eg. nethogs does not show transfer speed and amount in the same trace output. for this I had to spawn 2 nethogs process with different cli args and match the the output logs using a dict later, using pid as key.

• I also spawn a new nethogs process for each new websocket connection, and therefore logs will start afresh for a new session. Instead I should have spawned one and collected the logs somewhere. Netdata is an awesome software I found that solves logs and realtime charts very gracefully, its architecture is something I wish to study later.

• This program is not suitable for long use, As the process list will grow very large and slow down the UI. personally I run it only to view quick graphs when I want.

Screenshots

Requirements:

• nethogs (0.8.2 +) make sure its available in your path. This tool provides all the information and is quick to use from cli. Hogwatch gui plots graphs from this data over time.
• python 2.7

Install

• pip install hogwatch --upgrade

update: The package requires a pip module called pywebview for opening a webview window directly. It sometimes doesn't display output as it would on a web browser such as chrome, moreover installing it requires some additional packages on some systems as reported by users. see issue #6 and #4

Running

As hogwatch runs a light web server. you can view using either

1. Standalone (webview): sudo hogwatch sudo is needed for nethogs. Its a bad idea to run the whole process as root. need to fix this.

2. Web browser: sudo hogwatch server view at localhost:6432. for custom port specify port egsudo hogwatch server 8010. You can see this output from other devices on the network by specifying ip in place of localhost.

3. Menubar: currently experimental. head to the menubar folder for instructions

Usage

The list contains the process names. Initially none of the processes is selected and global(accumulated) transfer rate/amount are displayed in the ui. Upon clicking one of the processes from the list, the metrics belonging to that process only will be shown. clicking on it again will toggle it off and will switch to global metrics once again.

note: on osx, currently only connections are shown and are yet to be mapped to the process.

Toggles on the top right: - play/pause button stops updating the graph so you may scroll it sideways without it jumping to the end with each update. - 5m,30m etc. are graph range selectors and determine the range window for the graph. For eg. if 5m is selected then the graph is scaled to show the latest 5 minute stats (pause and scroll for navigating history). "[ ]" button makes the range over the entire duration of the program.

installation/run: (Development)

Hogwatch uses a light python webserver(bottle) feeding nethogs trace mode output to the frontend (Vue.js) using websockets.

hogwatch uses pipenv for managing virtual env and package versions.

• git clone https://github.com/akshayKMR/hogwatch.git
• cd hogwatch
• optional: for only server mode. remove pywebview from requirements.txt and comment it from setup.py
• In project root: pipenv install --dev --two. This installs packages required.
• Jump into your virutal env: pipenv shell
• Setup locally: python setup.py develop
• Allow running hogwatch script: chmod u+x ./bin/hogwatch
• run with sudo ./bin/hogwatch
• optional sudo ./bin/hogwatch server for only server accessible at https://localhost:6432

Frontend: The python bottle app serves a built frontend application whose source lies in /vue-app. To make changes to the frontend you need to setup the vue-app.

• cd vue-app
• yarn install
• yarn run dev. This will open a frontend development server which will automatically proxy all api calls to localhost:6432. So have your hogwatch server running there as explained in previous steps.
• After you've fininshed making your changes. Run yarn run build. This will build the vue-app and the next time you run Hogwatch server, you'll have your updates.

License

MIT
Copyright Akshay Kumar [email protected]