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RustNet: The High-Performance Network Monitor Built with Rust That Replaces Your Complex Toolchain

Quick Summary: 📝

RustNet is a cross-platform terminal UI tool for real-time network monitoring. It provides detailed insights into network connections, interface statistics, and packet data, with advanced filtering and process identification capabilities.

Key Takeaways: 💡

  • ✅ Provides real-time, cross-platform network monitoring with detailed connection state tracking (TCP, QUIC, DNS) directly in the terminal.

  • ✅ Features Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to identify application protocols like HTTP, TLS/SNI, and QUIC, enhancing observability.

  • ✅ Offers advanced TCP analytics, detecting retransmissions and out-of-order packets critical for performance debugging.

  • ✅ Includes high-performance process identification (using eBPF on Linux) and powerful vim/fzf-style filtering within a TUI.

  • ✅ Built entirely with Rust for high speed, reliability, and minimal system overhead during monitoring.

Project Statistics: 📊

  • Stars: 1532
  • 🍴 Forks: 51
  • Open Issues: 2

Tech Stack: 💻

  • ✅ Rust

Are you tired of juggling fragmented tools just to figure out what's happening on your network? Standard monitoring utilities often give you a cryptic snapshot or require heavy setup. This is where RustNet steps in, offering a unified, lightning-fast solution for network observability right in your terminal. It’s built entirely in Rust, which means you get blazing speed, minimal overhead, and reliability, making network debugging far less painful.

The core purpose of RustNet is to provide real-time, deep visibility into every connection flowing through your system. Think of it as a supercharged version of netstat or lsof that doesn't just list connections, but actively understands them. It monitors all common protocols—TCP, UDP, ICMP—and displays detailed state information. For instance, it doesn't just show a TCP connection is active; it tells you if it's ESTABLISHED, SYN_SENT, or in TIME_WAIT, helping you diagnose latency issues instantly. It even tracks complex states for modern protocols like QUIC and SSH.

What truly sets RustNet apart is its Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) capabilities. It goes beyond simple port numbers to actually detect the application protocol running inside the packets. Whether it’s HTTP, a TLS connection using Server Name Indication (SNI), DNS queries, or even modern protocols like QUIC, RustNet identifies it. This is invaluable because you instantly know what traffic is flowing, not just where it's going. Furthermore, it tracks sophisticated network analytics, like detecting TCP retransmissions or out-of-order packets, giving you crucial data for troubleshooting performance bottlenecks that are invisible to basic monitors.

For developers, this translates directly to massive time savings. Debugging microservices, understanding container networking, or just figuring out which process is hogging bandwidth becomes trivial. RustNet smartly associates connections with the originating process ID, and on Linux, it uses high-performance eBPF for low-overhead identification. If you need to quickly isolate specific traffic, its beautiful Terminal User Interface (TUI), built with Ratatui, offers advanced, real-time filtering using simple keywords like port:8080, sni:google.com, or state:TIME_WAIT.

The project is designed to be truly cross-platform, working seamlessly across Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD. This consistency means you use the same powerful tool regardless of your development or production environment. The commitment to a smart connection lifecycle—with protocol-aware timeouts and visual indicators (white to yellow to red) for stale connections—ensures your display remains clean and focused on active, relevant data. RustNet brings modern, high-performance network analysis to the command line, transforming a traditionally complex task into an elegant, efficient developer experience.

Learn More: 🔗

View the Project on GitHub


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