A little gem included with the Crossbow Virtual Wire Demo Tool is a DTrace script and associated Chime display written by Crossbow engineer Kais Belgaied. I've augmented the script a bit by adding an END clause to format the output, which shows the number of bits transferred over the period of time the script is run:

bleonard@opensolaris:~$ dtrace -s vWireBuilder/VWire/so.d 
Tracing... Hit Ctrl-C to end.
^C
Process              Zone       Protocol   Destination      Port           Bits

pidgin               global     TCP        202.43.216.31    5050             296
firefox-bin          global     TCP        66.196.87.126     443           13968

Trace ran for 29 seconds

The associated Chime display is useful when you want to monitor a system with lots of network traffic. In this example I'm using Netperf to simulate traffic between my global zone and a local zone, which has been configured to run at IP address 10.0.1.50:

In this example you can see we're achieving a throughput of 932,708,352 bits per second, or approximately 933 megabits per second. In my case the local zone is configured using a Crossbow VNIC, myzone0:

bleonard@opensolaris:~$ dladm show-vnic
LINK         OVER         SPEED  MACADDRESS           MACADDRTYPE         VID
myzone0      e1000g0      1000   2:8:20:59:0:b5       random              0

Notice the link speed of myzone0 is 1000 megabits per second, and at the moment it's using just about every bit of that bandwitdh, potentially starving other virtual NICs and the physical NIC itself from the network. Fortunately, Crossbow allows me to put some reigns on my virtual NICs. For example, if I do the following:

pfexec dladm set-linkprop -p maxbw=200 myzone0

Above we can see we're now running just under 200 megabits per second. Or More ridiculously:

pfexec dladm set-linkprop -p maxbw=2 myzone0

We're now under 2 megabits per second.

Now it is also possible to drill down on the Chime display, graphing throughput over time. The above scenario looks like so:

If you want to check this out on your own environment, you only need the D script, Chime and the Network display:

• The DTrace script: so.d
• Chime
  
• The Chime display: Network.xml

 <void property="programFileName">
   <string>/export/home/bleonard/so.d</string>
 </void>

To launch the Chime display:

chime -C ./Network.xml