The Good, the Blog & the Ugly - Tim Cook's Weblog

nicstat - the Solaris Network Monitoring Tool You Did Not Know You Needed

Update

On the prompting of a number of colleagues, I have written a Linux version of nicstat. It is included in the links below.

History

A few years ago, a bloke I know by the name of Brendan Gregg wrote a Solaris kstat-based utility called nicstat. Last year, I decided I needed to use this utility to capture network statistics in testing I do. Then I got a request from a colleague in PAE to do something about nicstat not being aware of "e1000g" interfaces.

I have spent a bit of time adding to nicstat since then, so I thought I would make the improved version available.

Why Should I Still Be Interested?

nicstat is to network interfaces as "iostat" is to disks, or "prstat" is to processes. It is designed as a much better version of "netstat -i". Its differences include:

• Reports bytes in & out as well as packets.
• Normalizes these values to per-second rates.
• Reports on all interfaces (while iterating)
• Reports Utilization (rough calculation as of now)
• Reports Saturation (also rough)
• Prefixes statistics with the current time

How about an example?

eac-t2000-3[bash]# nicstat 5
    Time      Int   rKB/s   wKB/s   rPk/s   wPk/s    rAvs    wAvs %Util    Sat
17:05:17      lo0    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00  0.00   0.00
17:05:17  e1000g0    0.61    4.07    4.95    6.63   126.2   628.0  0.04   0.00
17:05:17  e1000g1   225.7   176.2   905.0   922.5   255.4   195.6  0.33   0.00
    Time      Int   rKB/s   wKB/s   rPk/s   wPk/s    rAvs    wAvs %Util    Sat
17:05:22      lo0    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00  0.00   0.00
17:05:22  e1000g0    0.06    0.15    1.00    0.80   64.00   186.0  0.00   0.00
17:05:22  e1000g1    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00  0.00   0.00
eac-t2000-3[bash]# nicstat -i e1000g0 5 4
    Time      Int   rKB/s   wKB/s   rPk/s   wPk/s    rAvs    wAvs %Util    Sat
17:08:49  e1000g0    0.61    4.07    4.95    6.63   126.2   628.0  0.04   0.00
17:08:54  e1000g0    0.06    0.04    1.00    0.20   64.00   186.0  0.00   0.00
17:08:59  e1000g0   239.2    2.33   174.4   33.60  1404.4   71.11  1.98   0.00
17:09:04  e1000g0    0.01    0.04    0.20    0.20   64.00   186.0  0.00   0.00

References & Resources

The latest source and binaries are available here:

• nicstat.c - the source
• nicstat.SunOS_i386 - binary for Solaris 10 or later, i386 platform
• nicstat.SunOS_sparc - binary for Solaris 8 or later, SPARC platform
• nicstat-linux.c - the source for the Linux version
• bufsplit.c - needed for the Linux version of nicstat (not included in Linux)
• nicstat.Linux_i386 - binary for Linux, i386 platform ("GNU/Linux 2.2.5")

Note - the binaries will probably work on earlier releases of Solaris - as Solaris is just like that...

• brendangregg.com - Downloads, where I found nicstat
• solarisinternals.com - Performance Tool List
• OpenSolaris Forums - Posting from Brendan about recent updates to nicstat
• Blog O' Matty - Viewing NIC throughput with nicstat
• Weak Focus - Nicstat, Solaris network utilization

Posted at 05:29PM Feb 14, 2007 by timc in Performance  |