Netifstats

Netifstats is a software utility designed to collect and present statistics for network interfaces on a host. It gathers data from the operating system’s networking stack to provide visibility into traffic, utilization, and interface health, aiding administrators and developers in monitoring and debugging networks.

Typical metrics include packets transmitted and received, errors, drops, frame collisions, multicast and broadcast counts, and cumulative bytes. Many implementations also expose per-interface bandwidth utilization, queue lengths for multi-queue NICs, and short-term trends.

Data collection methods vary by platform. On Linux, data may be retrieved via netlink, sysfs/procfs, or the iproute2 toolkit; on BSD systems, through kernel statistics and ifconfig; and on Windows through performance counters or WMI. Output formats often include human-readable summaries and machine-readable forms such as JSON or CSV, with options for sampling intervals and historical logging.

Netifstats is commonly used for real-time monitoring, capacity planning, and fault isolation. Design goals emphasize low overhead, portability across Unix-like systems, and compatibility with existing monitoring stacks. Some implementations offer a daemon mode, local APIs, and integration hooks for dashboards and alerting systems.

See also: ifconfig, ip, netstat, ethtool, iperf, SNMP, Prometheus, Nagios.