My machine is a server so I want to ignore connections being made to my server (e.g. when someone visits my website). I want to see only connections/requests being made by my server to other places.

How do I see only those outgoing connections?

I'm new to this type of thing What i'm trying to do is just to see if anything from my server is sent out other than the data for my web apps Obviously if someone visits my websites then my server will send data to the client's browser So suppose there's also code in my web app framework that sends statistical data to another place i'm not aware of I'd like to see which place my server sends data to if there's one It's probably not likely but suppose you decide to use a php or nodejs framework you didn't write there's a small chance that it might send some type of data somewhere If so, that's what i'd like to see.

Best Answer

Use netstat . For example

$ netstat -nputw
Active Internet connections (w/o servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name
[...]
tcp        0      0 192.168.25.222:22       192.168.0.134:42903     ESTABLISHED 32663/sshd: gert [p

lists all UDP ( u ), TCP ( t ) and RAW ( w ) outgoing connections (not using l or a ) in a numeric form ( n , prevents possible long-running DNS queries) and includes the program ( p ) associated with that.

Consider adding the c option to get output being updated continuously.