LAN port utilisation

[adrianjang]

Hello, 

Does anyone know how to determine the % utilisation of a LAN port on a HP-UX server?

Thanks. 

[user001]

try glance if you have it.

if you have access to the switch it might help?

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

In very general terms:

Get the values of the traffic counters of the port (using "lanadmin -g <port number>" or SNMP), wait a certain time, then get the traffic counter values again. Subtract the start values from the end values, and divide the result by (port speed * time waited). Then multiply by 100 to get a percentage value of the average utilization over the time period. Repeat.

Any program that can draw network traffic graphs using data available over SNMP can probably produce a utilization graph with a calculation like this too. For example, Cacti is a free solution that can do exactly this.

If the port is in half-duplex mode, you can add transmit + receive values together to get overall utilization. If the port is in full-duplex mode, the transmit and receive are effectively independent channels, so you might draw useful conclusions from calculating the transmit and receive utilizations separately.

An utilization value is only meaningful over a period of time: instantaneous utilization values would be either 0% (= not transferring data right now) or 100% (= transferring data at the speed dictated by the network technology used).

[adrianjang]

Thanks for the replies.  It confirms that there's no simple method, but your info is good to know.