measuring your network throughput on Solaris

You can use nicstat utility to measure your network device utilization and throughput. The utility itself uses solaris kstat for network device statistics information. Statistics include network read and write in kilobytes, packets and device utilization.You can compile nicstat with gcc as shown below.

# gcc nicstat.c -o nicstat -lkstat -lgen -lsocket

Following image shows a sample output from nicstat utility.

getting network interface statistics on Solaris

There are many ways to get network interface status and statistics on Solaris. I'll show some of them. First one is well known command netstat. netstat's "-i" parameter will give you statistics of devices used for ip traffic. Statistics include input/output total packets,errors and collisions for each network device.


Next method is by using solaris ndd command. First, we have to find our device name. This can be done by ifconfig command.
My network device name is "e1000g0" as seen in sample output above. Now, it's time to ask ndd which parameters are supported by this device. We do this by calling ndd (ndd /dev/e1000g0 \?) with our device name and "\?" parameter to display every supported parameter.


ndd let's you change some interface settings. They're marked as "read and write". The parameter names clearly shows what they are for. As you can see in sample output below, ndd can give us link speed, link status (cable plugged/unplugged),duplex mode and autoneg status. Following sample output shows us that my network interface link status is 1, which means the network cable is plugged,Network speed is 1000mbit and auto negotiation is on.
The other command is called dladm. dladm can give us above results with one command and in easily readable format. Also, it can give network interface statistics like netstat with "-s" parameter except collisions.