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Show HN: Network Monitor – a GUI to spot anomalous connections on your Linux
A real-time network connection monitoring tool built with Rust and GTK4, displaying active connections with live I/O statistics in a modern graphical interface.
https://github.com/grigio/network-monitor https://github.com/grigio/network-monitor
- SlavikCA 11mo agoThat screenshot / video on README page is mostly unreadable. Can't get anything out of it.
- voodooEntity 11mo agoSame for me. What info does it show more than a: "netstat -tulpn" Wrote myself a script years ago that basically loops netstat -tulpn watch like for the same purpose - just wondering if your tool shows me more than that.
- Simon-curtis 11mo agomodern graphical interface, for a start
- voodooEntity 11mo agoI was asking which information it shows not what output it uses to display that information....
- hamburglar 11mo agoCome on, now. You can see that it supports today’s most critical feature: it has dark mode and light mode. /s
- noir_lord 11mo agoIf you live in the terminal it's all dark mode* * unless you are one of those weirdo's who has a black on white terminal in which case you should be on a watch list (/s in case wasn't immediately obvious).
- hamburglar 11mo agoI am exactly that kind of weirdo, but then again I’ve been reading black on white books for my entire life and I never thought to complain about it.
- bolangi 11mo agoI've been there since the DOS days when it was all dark mode, green phosphor characters on a black CRT. I was there when amber monitors were the new thing. (I still love sunglasses with brown lenses.) And I watched the early Apple computers with graphics and black-characters-on-white display style that has been the rage ever since... well since the recent new thing being dark mode. It reminds me of fashion trends, miniskirts then maxis, up and down past the knee like tides. Fads, that's the word.
- IshKebab 11mo agoThis app is clearly a demonstration of GTK4's light/dark transition animation. Looks like it works perfectly to me!
- mordechai9000 11mo agoNice work! I do want to say, I don't like having to rely on scraping ss output. But that's not a comment on this project - I have done the exact same thing. It just proved to be the most expedient way given the constraints I was under. I suspect there is a lot of devops and CI/CD code out there that relies on the output format of ss. My concern is that parsing text intended for human readability and not machine processing is brittle and prone to failure due to unforeseen circumstances, or a package upgrade that changes the behavior.
- mbana 11mo agoI was going to say the same thing. I really like the eBPF approach as pointed out to by the other comments. I feel like this is the ideal approach, please correct me if I'm wrong. A callback based approach as opposed to (constantly) polling the output of some command is ideal.
- khimaros 11mo agoit sounds like you want https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch
- WD-42 11mo agoNice work. I’ve been writing an app using the same stack. The gtk-rs bindings are actually pretty productive once you get used to it! And it’s so fast.
- mroche 11mo agoCool project! As a more advanced form, I think it should be possible to get all this information via eBPF rather than ss output and scraping /proc. Food for thought!
- rlmp_89 11mo agohttps://github.com/pythops/oryx https://github.com/pythops/oryx -> voila!
- mentalgear 11mo agoBTW: This is also a TUI - much preferred !
- arcanemachiner 11mo agoThe OP's project shows process names, which I do not see in this program.
- curcbit 11mo agoNice but it feels too much AI slop
- oneshtein 11mo agoeBPF doesn't work on locked down kernels (stock kernels in Secure Boot mode).
- mroche 11mo agoeBPF is restricted when booted in a SB environment, but it's not nonfunctional. The default config puts the kernel into "integrity" mode of Kernel Lockdown, which reduces scope of access and enforces read-only usage. Whether or not the specific functions needed to replicate this tool are impacted is beyond my knowledge.
- grigio 11mo agoI think this is a great point, eBPF is cool but probably less popular than ss
- pm2222 11mo agoeBPF/XDP is nice and hard to use. Packet capture is so common that I wish that there were a simpler way like pcap.
- rlmp_89 11mo agohttps://github.com/pythops/oryx https://github.com/pythops/oryx
- jrm4 11mo agoFantastic, more of this. I don't know if I'm just missing it or what, but I'd love a GUI thing that showed all the devices on my network maybe even with a graph view. I'm using an Eero router out of laziness and even it has some features here that I'd like to see more of in polished "home-user" style network tools; especially since it seems as if more are getting into the "homelab"/"selfhosted" thing.
- bongodongobob 11mo agoThat's impossible to do reliably without using agents, SNMP, or some other kind of communication protocol that you'll have to set up on each device. If you're ok with that, use SNMP. If you want topology, you'll have to have an agent that logs into all your networking gear and parses the configs.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- jrm4 11mo ago"Reliably" is doing a lot of heavy lifting; I'm aware that with a combination of all the netstats and pings and nmaps there are ways to poke around.
- bongodongobob 10mo agoWhat do you mean "reliably" is doing a lot of heavy lifting? Idk what that means.
- 0134340 11mo agoDo you mean something like nmap's network topolgy view? https://nmap.org/book/zenmap-topology.html https://nmap.org/book/zenmap-topology.html Just for visualizing network topology on Linux, there's a lot of tools.
- jdthedisciple 11mo agoIs there a version of this for the CLI?
- XiS 11mo agoSo nethogs, but with a gui?
- lone-cloud 11mo agoThe code is partly refined AI generated slop and the UX is lacking. The functionality is very basic and needs to be more thoroughly tested. This type of project is half a work day tops for a senior+ dev to create with agentic coding.
- johannesrexx 11mo agoMay I ask how you made the determination that network-monitor is "partly refined AI generated slop"?
- LoganDark 11mo agoI came to this conclusion as well. The README gives off some vibes but the sheer volume and writing style of the code comments is what really sells it for me. For example: https://github.com/grigio/network-monitor/blob/9dc470553bfdd9e4690e38f8b170a306fb461eba/src/ui/window.rs#L593 https://github.com/grigio/network-monitor/blob/9dc470553bfdd... // Enhanced styling with column-specific classes and alignment This sort of marketing-speak isn't what people typically put in their code, LLMs love buzzwords. It's not just this, it's everything, but hopefully you get what I mean.
- lone-cloud 11mo agoThe mindless code comments are a dead giveaway. It's always the same pattern of: "a thing" <--- here is a thing Generally a dev would clean these up, but when they don't it's a major red flag to me that it's just unreviewed vibe coded slop.
- neilv 11mo agoThanks especially for using GTK with Rust to do this. We need to keep desktop Linux GUI libraries alive and viable (as an alterative to Web site GUI frameworks, Electron apps with Web frameworks, and proprietary mobile app platforms).
- hombre_fatal 11mo agoThough I was let down last week when I ported a TUI to GTK4 and found out that even a hello world gtk4.h C app uses 200mb RAM. I haven’t tried it yet but I believe Qt will weigh around the same. The TUI I ported uses <8mb RAM so I kinda lost interest in the GUI endeavor for my tools since I like to have one running in each project workspace.
- exploraz 11mo ago> Though I was let down last week when I ported a TUI to GTK4 and found out that even a hello world gtk4.h C app uses 200mb RAM. Bit of a rant I wanted to share here: I've seen the same happened on zenity (a GUI dialog utility for shell scripts) since they migrated from GTK3 into GTK4. Now zenity took almost 2 seconds to launch instead of .5 to a second when they still used GTK3. This might be an issue on both libadwaita and GTK4 itself. Both pavucontrol (which uses GTK4 but not libadwaita, at least for now) and even a simple dialog in zenity (GTK4+libadwaita) consumed over 100 MiB of memory according to btop measurement, while both thunar and engrampa, which is both GTK3 apps, only consumed half the amount of memory usage (about 50 MiB according to btop). However, I've noticed that zenity, GNOME apps, and other apps that uses libadwaita took longer to launch compared to apps that only used GTK4 (pavucontrol), which launched as fast as other GTK3 apps does.
- exploraz 11mo agoUpdate: It turns out that in GTK4, half of the memory usage were dedicated to OpenGL hardware rendering alone. Using GSK_RENDERER=cairo almost halved the memory usage of most GTK4 apps, but it doesn't fix the startup time.
- hombre_fatal 11mo ago
- BoppreH 11mo agoCool project, I wish we had more GUIs for these OS functions. How was your experience with GTK4 and Rust? And it's a bit sad that in the year of our lord 2025, the best way to get such fundamental information is by using regexes to parse a table[1], generated by a 6000-line C program[2], which is verified by (I hope I'm wrong!) a tiny test suite[3]. OSQuery[4] is also pretty cool, but it builds upon this fragile stack. That's something I miss from Windows, at least PowerShell has built-in commands that give you structured output. [1] https://github.com/grigio/network-monitor/blob/9dc470553bfdd9e4690e38f8b170a306fb461eba/src/services/network.rs#L24 https://github.com/grigio/network-monitor/blob/9dc470553bfdd... [2] https://github.com/iproute2/iproute2/blob/main/misc/ss.c https://github.com/iproute2/iproute2/blob/main/misc/ss.c [3] https://github.com/iproute2/iproute2/blob/main/testsuite/tests/ss/ssfilter.t https://github.com/iproute2/iproute2/blob/main/testsuite/tes... [4] https://osquery.io/ https://osquery.io/
- typpilol 11mo agoI am in the process of building myself a cross platform GUI for network monitoring. Simply because I need one for non-critical stuff and things like uptime robot are enterprise geared and too expensive for me to entertain. I wish there was an uptime robot for like 25 cents a monitor a month.
- tuergeist 10mo ago@typpilol And you'd like to pay from credits or on a pay-per-use basis?
- arcanemachiner 11mo agoUptime Kuma is FOSS, not sure if it is missing any features you might be expecting. Very easy to set up as well. https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma
- tuergeist 10mo agoAnd you'd pay those 25ct/month? on a credit points base or per use?
- 11mo ago
- heybrendan 11mo agoI see that you're parsing `ss` output in 'src/services/network.rs' (L22-L31) [1]. I find this to be a rather shaky foundation as any future drift or deviation in the `ss` utility's output could potentially yield unforeseen consequences. I'm vaguely aware that there are crates available in the Rust ecosystem for interrogating and manipulating sockets much more directly as well as high level abstractions for all things netlink (read: AF_NETLINK). Is wielding Rust's socket/netlink libraries unsuitable in some way, or was it merely deemed out of the design scope? Very cool project, please keep going! [1] https://github.com/grigio/network-monitor/blob/master/src/services/network.rs#L22-L31 https://github.com/grigio/network-monitor/blob/master/src/se...
- a-dub 11mo agomaybe consider support for the opensnitch ebpf backend?
- grigio 11mo agoI tried to do the most simple thing, thanks for the feedback
- gdevenyi 11mo agoInstead of directly parsing ss, use the jc program to produce JSON. https://kellyjonbrazil.github.io/jc/docs/parsers/ss.html https://kellyjonbrazil.github.io/jc/docs/parsers/ss.html
- lsferreira42 10mo agoIt will suffer from the same problem if the output from ss changes
- grigio 10mo agoThanks, I use native rust libs now
- Beijinger 11mo agoOn a first look: The same as the shell tool nethogs, just with a GUI
- kazishariar 11mo agoSubmitted a pull request for MacOS Support - please approve. Tnx!
- cookiengineer 11mo agoThis shows only the contents of /proc fs, right? If you want realtime connection details, eBPF and XDP allow much more insights for that, as you can also parse network protocol payloads and implement adapters for each network protocol.
- k_bx 11mo agoI wish Linux had two more things: - https://github.com/winsiderss/systeminformer https://github.com/winsiderss/systeminformer power-user process explorer - something akin windows system monitor, gnome's needs an upgrade
- butz 11mo agoFirst, a praise: Thank you for using native desktop UI, not some web framework and shipping additional browser along. And a bit of critique: Main screenshot should be bigger, and present the main view of the application. Ability to switch light/dark mode comes by default and target audience is more likely to see what data application displays and how.
- grigio 11mo agoWelcome, yes i put a better screenshot