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ujjain
Asked: 2016-06-15 04:52:31 +0800 CST

How reliable is /sys/class/net/eth0/statistics/rx_bytes for bandwidth statistics?

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I found this script at https://github.com/Cosmologist/collectd-network-bandwidth-usage. 

<Plugin exec>
    Exec user "/tmp/exec-network-bandwidth-usage.sh" "eth0"
</Plugin>

It runs a bash script that checks /sys/class/net/eth0/statistics/rx_bytes and tx_bytes.

#!/bin/bash

HOSTNAME="${COLLECTD_HOSTNAME:-`hostname -f`}"
INTERVAL="${COLLECTD_INTERVAL:-60}"

while sleep "$INTERVAL"; do
    RX=`cat /sys/class/net/$1/statistics/rx_bytes`
    TX=`cat /sys/class/net/$1/statistics/tx_bytes`

    echo "PUTVAL $HOSTNAME/network-bandwidth-usage/if_octets interval=$INTERVAL N:$RX:$TX"
done

My goal is to see how much MB's of traffic was transfered in a timespan. How reliable is using the data from /sys/class/net/eth0/statistics/rx_bytes like this to find out how much traffic our entire server farm is producing?

network-monitoring bandwidth traffic collectd bandwidth-measuring

1 Answers

  1. I´ve installed in a lot of my linux servers to monitor my traffic interface the vnstat command. It is very easy to install and you get with this great deal of information. https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/vnstat-network-monitoring-ubuntu/

    I guess /sys/class/net/eth0/statistics are reliable but will have to be stored in a monitoring app to extract then useful information... With vnstat installed in our system you have all this information when you need it in the system itself.

    I hope it can be useful

    Kind regards

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