Low and time‐changing inertia values due to the high percentage of renewable energy sources (RESs) can cause stability problems in power systems due to rapid frequency instabilities. Inertia monitoring will assist operators to apply suitable actions and more proper control methods to alleviate stability issues. Therefore, this paper proposes an online method to estimate the total inertia of a network using a recursive least‐squares approach. The proposed method uses network measurements with a non‐recursive system identification approach to initially estimate the network hypothesis model. Then, the recursive method is used together with time changing measurements to recursively estimate model parameters and extract online inertia estimates of the network. During the estimation, the method does not need to store previous data after each sample step; therefore, the computation burden is significantly reduced. More importantly, the technique incorporates the use of available electromechanical oscillation modes in the system, which are linked with system parameters, to determine the network inertia estimates. The applicability of the proposed method has been validated by numerical simulations of the IEEE 39‐bus network and the aggregated New Zealand network with its actual inertia data.