The purpose of this document is to show utilities that are available in the Linux world to monitor network traffic (so we're not reinventing the wheel).
Here are some good resources to read, but this file contains my favorite utilities:
Nload is a commandline tool that allows users to monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic separately. It also draws out a graph to indicate the same, the scale of which can be adjusted. Easy and simple to use, and does not support many options.
So if you just need to take a quick look at the total bandwidth usage without details of individual processes, then nload will be handy.
$ nload
Nethogs is a small 'net top' tool that shows the bandwidth used by individual processes and sorts the list putting the most intensive processes on top. In the event of a sudden bandwidth spike, quickly open nethogs and find the process responsible. Nethogs reports the PID, user and the path of the program.
sudo nethogs