I manage a number of Solaris hosts that push a fair amount of data each day. These servers utilize Solaris 802.3ad link aggregations, which contain anywhere from 4 to 8 physical NICs. Monitoring the bandwidth across the links in an aggregation is a snap with Solaris, since most of the dladm subcommands support the “-s” (show statistics) option:
$ dladm show-aggr -s -i 2 1
key:1 ipackets rbytes opackets obytes %ipkts %opkts
Total 355021 531533375 60288 4944021
nxge0 166090 249992028 0 0 46.8 0.0
nxge1 120638 179830318 0 0 34.0 0.0
nxge4 16 1172 25728 2109696 0.0 42.7
nxge5 68277 101709857 34560 2834325 19.2 57.3
key:1 ipackets rbytes opackets obytes %ipkts %opkts
Total 344131 513180425 47543 3900596
nxge0 167398 250160702 12 1672 48.6 0.0
nxge1 95286 142041090 8 1330 27.7 0.0
nxge4 17 1320 21601 1771571 0.0 45.4
nxge5 81430 120977313 25922 2126023 23.7 54.5
In the example above, dladm printed the number of bytes and packets received for each link in the aggregation that was created with key number 1. While not quite as awesome as nicstat, the statistics option is handy for getting a quick overview of the number of packets and bytes traversing each link.