Wednesday February 14, 2007

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