How to use octomon

octomon is a terminal dashboard for your Internet connection. Use it in three ways, and each one builds on the last.

Learn your everyday networks

Run octomon on the networks you use most: home, the office, the café you work from. Leave it up for a while. After five healthy minutes it has a baseline for that network, what latency, loss, DNS timing, Wi-Fi signal and speed normally look like there. Then quit. The baseline is saved.

The next time that network feels wrong, run octomon again. It recognises the network and grades what it sees against that normal, so the answer is "worse than usual here" rather than a threshold somebody else set. Press L to see every network it has learned, and N to give one a name.

A minute with a fault in it never teaches the baseline, so it is safe to learn while things are going wrong; it just learns more slowly.

Diagnose the connection you are on

Baseline or not, octomon judges the connection you are on right now. The footer is the one-line answer: ● connection healthy or ▲ gateway unresponsive. Press y for the full analysis: a ladder from your machine to the Internet, each rung with its evidence, and the findings ranked with the cause first and its symptoms after.

From there, t traces the path, m monitors every hop, c checks which ports this network lets out, W asks who owns an address and s runs a speed test. e opens the timeline of everything that changed this session.

Need to send the picture to somebody? octomon --doctor prints a redacted text report of the same analysis, and D writes a support bundle.

Keep watch on a network you do not trust

On a flight, in a hotel, at a conference: start octomon the moment you join the Wi-Fi. The session bar along the bottom grades every second, so when the call drops at minute forty you can walk back to it (b, then Enter) and see what was happening and what changed just before.

octomon knows a plane is not a desk. Heavy ping loss with the web still getting through reads as "degraded but usable", not as an outage, and a network that blocks pings, or even the web itself, is measured over whatever still gets out rather than declared dead.

Not going to be watching? octomon --watch --alert runs headless and notifies you when a finding raises or clears.

Then read the analysis

The FAQ explains how octomon judges (baselines, colours, why the analysis changes its mind more slowly than the graphs), and the glossary covers the terms on screen. Installing is one command on the front page.