Re: [PATCH v3 00/11] Port XStats

[Thomas Monjalon <thomas.monjalon@6wind.com>]

2015-10-29 09:57, Kyle Larose:
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 9:10 AM, Thomas Monjalon
> <thomas.monjalon@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?