What is Listening on a TCP Port?

To find what is listening on a TCP/IP port, open a terminal and go to a shell command-line, and use lsof, a command that LiSts Open Files (TCP ports are considered a type of file in UNIX).

This checks all listening ports:

$ sudo lsof -nP -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN

COMMAND    PID     USER  FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
influxd    680 influxdb   3u  IPv6  13892      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:8088 (LISTEN)
influxd    680 influxdb  21u  IPv6  17019      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:8086 (LISTEN)
postgres   888 postgres   6u  IPv4  16842      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:5432 (LISTEN)
jupyter-n 2351   rjohns   6u  IPv4  22752      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:8888 (LISTEN)
...

The following check is specific to port 5432:

$ sudo lsof -nP -iTCP:5432 -sTCP:LISTEN

COMMAND  PID     USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
postgres 888 postgres    6u  IPv4  16842      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:5432 (LISTEN)

These commands work for most Linux flavors.

Related

Blog: Cloudy with a Chance of TCP Drops
Network Data: Key Concepts
Network Performance Monitoring
Corvil for IT Operations Analytics