While analzying some throughput issues this weekend, it came to my attention that I have never written about my favorite network analysis tools. I have 10 - 12 utilities that I cannot live without, and plan to cover each utility over the next few weeks (stay tuned!). Tonight, you are in luck! I present to you nicstat:
$ nicstat 5
Time Int rKb/s wKb/s rPk/s wPk/s rAvs wAvs %Util Sat
00:27:34 hme0 1.50 70.79 21.96 57.29 69.93 1265.28 0.59 0.00
00:27:39 hme0 1.38 68.24 20.15 55.46 70.28 1259.90 0.57 0.00
00:27:44 hme0 1.33 72.09 19.37 58.51 70.45 1261.69 0.60 0.00
00:27:49 hme0 1.57 70.89 22.36 58.29 71.73 1245.39 0.59 0.00
00:27:54 hme0 1.40 69.54 20.36 56.48 70.24 1260.69 0.58 0.00
00:27:59 hme0 1.32 69.52 18.96 56.29 71.05 1264.75 0.58 0.00
00:28:04 hme0 1.51 70.82 22.16 57.09 69.89 1270.31 0.59 0.00
This nifty utility reports utilization metrics for each Ethernet interface in a Solaris server. nicstat is written in C and Perl, and the program header contains the following descriptions of each field that is displayed:
Int Interface
rKb/s read Kbytes/s
wKb/s write Kbytes/s
rPk/s read Packets/s
wPk/s write Packets/s
rAvs read Average size, bytes
wAvs write Average size, bytes
%Util %Utilisation (r+w/ifspeed)
Sat Saturation (defer, nocanput, norecvbuf, noxmtbuf)
Brendan Gregg creates some amazing tools, and I highly recommend sending him lots of beer and chocolate (or thank you emails if your cheap)!