Gathering Statistics About Network Traffic on Flows

Flow statistics help you evaluate packet traffic on any defined flows on the system. To obtain flow information, you use the flowstat command. For more information about this command, refer to the flowstat(1M) man page.

The most commonly used syntax of the flowstat command follows:

# flowstat [-r|-t] [-i interval] [-l link] [flow]

[-r|-t]

Displays either receive-side statistics only (-r option) or transmit-side statistics only (-t option). To display statistics for both the receive-side and the transmit-side, omit the option.

-i interval

Specifies the time in seconds at which you want the displayed statistics to be refreshed. If you do not use this option, then static output is displayed.

-l link

Indicates that you want to monitor the statistics for all the flows on the specified datalink. If you do not use this option, then information about all the flows on all the datalinks is displayed.

flow

Indicates that you want to monitor the statistics of a specified flow only. If you do not use this option, then depending on whether you specified a link, all flow statistics are displayed.

The following examples show different ways to display information about configured flows on the system.

Example 4-1 Displaying Traffic Statistics for All Flows at One-Second Intervals

This example shows information every second about incoming and outgoing traffic on all configured flows on the system.

# flowstat -i 1
FLOW     IPKTS   RBYTES  IERRS    OPKTS  OBYTES  OERRS
flow1  528.45K  787.39M      0  179.39K  11.85M      0
flow2  742.81K    1.10G      0        0       0      0
flow3        0        0      0        0       0      0
flow1   67.73K  101.02M      0   21.04K    1.39M     0
flow2        0        0      0        0       0      0
flow3        0        0      0        0       0      0
...
^C

This example shows statistics about outgoing traffic for all configured flows.

Example 4-2 Displaying Transmit-Side Statistics for All Flows

# flowstat -t 
 FLOW    OPKTS   OBYTES   OERRS
flow1   24.37M    1.61G       0
flow2        0        0       0
flow1        4      216       0

Example 4-3 Displaying Receive-Side Statistics for All Flows on a Specified Link

This example shows incoming traffic in hardware lanes on all the flows that were created over the datalink net0.

# flowstat -r -i 2 -l net0
    FLOW    IPKTS   RBYTES    IERRS
tcp-flow  183.11K  270.24M        0
udp-flow        0        0        0
tcp-flow  373.83K  551.52M        0
udp-flow        0        0        0
tcp-flow  372.35K  549.04M        0
udp-flow        0        0        0
tcp-flow  372.87K  549.61M        0
udp-flow        0        0        0
tcp-flow  371.57K  547.89M        0
udp-flow        0        0        0
tcp-flow  191.92K  282.95M        0
udp-flow  206.51K  310.70M        0
tcp-flow        0        0        0
udp-flow  222.75K  335.15M        0
tcp-flow        0        0        0
udp-flow  223.00K  335.52M        0
tcp-flow        0        0        0
udp-flow  160.22K  241.07M        0
tcp-flow        0        0        0
udp-flow  167.89K  252.61M        0
tcp-flow        0        0        0
udp-flow    9.52K   14.32M        0
^C