sntop: A simple, network kind of top

For as many *top programs as there are, it shouldn’t surprise me that there’s an sntop. It should surprise me that sntop is a little … different.

sntop doesn’t really poll anything local, unless you tell it to test your loopback address. Otherwise, sntop checks servers — or other addresses, like a network access point — to see if they respond. Simple enough.

And in terms of setup and output, sntop is pretty simple too. It won’t do anything until you give it a proper ~/.sntoprc file, and configuration is very straightforward — a display name, its IP and a space for comments or notes. That’s about it.

Output, as you can see above, is also fairly simple. sntop will pause until you press a key, and then recheck every server in its list.

sntop can also dump to an HTML file, and has a few command line options as well. It can refresh at interval, sound an alarm if something isn’t responding, and output to a log file.

So yes, while it is simple, it can do a lot more than just what you see above.