What command line tools for monitoring host network activity on linux do you use?

Posted by user27388 on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by user27388
Published on 2009-11-26T23:40:13Z Indexed on 2010/06/09 15:32 UTC
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linux

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networking

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command-line

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best-practices

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nic

What command line tools are good for reliably monitoring network activity?

I have used ifconfig, but an office colleague said that its statistics are not always reliable. Is that true? I have recently used ethtool, but is it reliable? What about just looking at /proc/net 'files'? Is that any better?

EDIT

I'm interested in packets Tx/Rx, bytes Tx/Rx, but most importantly drops or errors and why the drop/error might have occurred.

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