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How to measure NIC Performance/Throughput in Solaris 11 using iftop

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Monitoring network connections certainly can be frustrating, mainly because they can be established and then disappear within a matter of seconds. In this post, we will show you how to achieve a Zen-like approach to monitoring network connections on your servers using a command line–based tool called iftop.

iftop is to networks what top is to CPUs. And, in the same way, ifconfig refers to configuring an interface, the friendly iftop stands for “interface top”. Iftop on Solaris 11, an open source monitoring tool to display bandwidth usage on an interface is available in this package:

# pkg info iftop
     Name: diagnostic/iftop
     Summary: iftop - Display bandwidth usage on an interface
     Category: Applications/System Utilities

The iftop software was built from community source: http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/iftop/download/iftop-0.17.tar.gz

iftop command examples on Solaris 11

To use iftop on vlan tagged datalinks specify option “-f vlan” using promiscuous mode to see vlan traffic on hosts and ports.

# iftop -n -f vlan -P -i vnic0

To use iftop specifying more than one filter:

# iftop -f "udp or tcp" -P -i  net0
Note: Do not use multiple -f filter code options , like : iftop -f udp -f tcp. You have to use only one -f with quotes for the filter

To use iftop on aggregated links:

# iftop -i aggr1

To use iftop without hostname lookups with IP’s and ports on net0 link in promiscuous mode – with example output

# iftop -n  -P -i net0
 Listening on net0 195Kb           391Kb           586Kb           781Kb      977Kb
└───────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────
192.168.1.105:45447        => 23.6.22.140:80             6.40Kb  7.34Kb  5.24Kb
                           <=                             127Kb   223Kb   159Kb
192.168.1.105:42609        => 23.6.22.140:80             2.70Kb  5.76Kb  4.11Kb
                           <=                            45.2Kb   205Kb   147Kb
192.168.1.105:42991        => 23.6.22.140:80             2.93Kb  4.15Kb  2.97Kb
                           <=                            50.4Kb   146Kb   104Kb
192.168.1.105:45318        => 23.6.22.140:80             2.80Kb  2.28Kb  1.63Kb
                           <=                            59.6Kb  72.8Kb  52.0Kb
192.168.1.105:44531        => 23.6.22.140:80             2.90Kb  2.78Kb  1.98Kb
                           <=                            55.6Kb  47.0Kb  33.6Kb
192.168.1.105:33685        => 23.6.22.140:80                0b   1.32Kb   966b
                           <=                               0b   39.6Kb  28.3Kb
192.168.1.105:44828        => 23.6.22.140:80             5.76Kb  1.86Kb  1.33Kb
                           <=                             127Kb  27.5Kb  19.7Kb
192.168.1.105:64890        => 23.6.22.140:80             2.95Kb  2.35Kb  1.68Kb
                           <=                            47.3Kb  19.2Kb  13.7Kb
192.168.1.105:45991        => 23.6.22.140:80                0b    636b    454b
                           <=                               0b   14.5Kb  10.4Kb
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
TX:             cumm:  48.0KB   peak:    142Kb  rates:   44.3Kb  37.5Kb  27.4Kb
RX:                    1.03MB           3.59Mb            531Kb   842Kb   602Kb
TOTAL:                 1.08MB           3.73Mb            576Kb   880Kb   630Kb

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