bmon vs ElastiFlow

bmon is a free bandwidth monitor and rate estimator for Linux and macOS. It captures networking statistics for monitoring and debugging, presenting them through an interactive curses interface or programmable text output for scripts. The 5.0 release notes describe graph rendering with Braille cells, JSON output, traffic-control ingress and egress display filters, and IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in additional information. Installation guidance covers Fedora and CentOS 7 packages, Debian or Ubuntu and CentOS 6 builds, and macOS installation through Homebrew or source compilation. Release notes also mention CI builds for Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, with fixes for FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, and OpenBSD builds. The repository lists MIT and BSD license files. bmon is maintained by tgraf and hosted on GitHub Pages. Its free plan costs nothing.

ElastiFlow collects and analyzes network flow and telemetry data for network observability and security analytics. Its performance and availability solution is intended to help network operations and engineering teams find and resolve issues across complex, distributed environments. It handles NetFlow, IPFIX, and sFlow, with application visibility, conversation analysis, and bandwidth monitoring. NetObserv offers visibility, open-data-platform integration, pre-built dashboards, and machine-learning jobs. ElastiFlow extracts more than 6,200 standard and vendor-specific fields from flow records and enriches them with GeoIP, autonomous-system, and IP-reputation information. Supported platforms include Elasticsearch, Elastic Cloud, Elastic Cloud Enterprise, OpenSearch, AWS OpenSearch Service, Apache Kafka, Confluent Platform, Redpanda, Splunk, and Cribl Stream. Deployment options include Docker, Linux, Ansible, and Helm. The virtual appliance supports VMware ESX, Proxmox, and KVM, and is intended for up to 16,000 flows per second from one location. Basic costs nothing and supports up to 4,000 records per second and 25 SNMP devices. A 30-day trial is available.