2015-10-29 09:57, Kyle Larose: > On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 9:10 AM, Thomas Monjalon > <thomas.monjalon at 6wind.com> wrote: > > > I don't understand. > > The basic statistics are provided in a common API. > > The other ones are not available in every NICs and can only be interpreted > > while knowing the device. So what is the need exactly? > > The need is to provide information to users about what sort of traffic > is being seen by the device, and why the hardware is behaving the way > it is, leveraging as much as possible the capabilities of the hardware > with minimal effort (i.e. not implementing an abstraction layer at a > higher level). > > These are quite useful for diagnosing wider network issues > (configuration, misbehaving devices, dirty fibers/etc). The common API > doesn't expose the more detailed information requested by the various > ethernet mibs. Of course, not all stats are applicable to all devices > (e.g. collisions), but those that are available are still invaluable.
Thanks for the explanation. > > Do you know an example of a networking layer having this kind of API? > > I have worked with SDKs for a few different physical switches and > NPUs. They all provide this sort of API. I think it is quite common > with networking equipment such as routers or switches. These stats > tend to be exposed over SNMP at the very least, and often within local > utilities on the devices themselves. So what is missing currently? Just having a consistent naming of similar counters?