Question

On Linux, how can I (programmatically) retrieve the following counters on a per-interface basis:

• Sent/received ethernet frames,
• Sent/received IPv4 packets,
• Sent/received IPv6 packets.

Answer 1

You should be able to do this using iptables rules and packet counters, e.g.

# input and output must be accounted for separately # ipv4, eth0 iptables -I INPUT -i eth0 iptables -I OUTPUT -o eth0 # ipv6, eth0 ip6tables -I INPUT -i eth0 ip6tables -I OUTPUT -o eth0 

And to view the stats, parse the output of these:

iptables -L -vxn ip6tables -L -vxn 

You should also look up the -Z flag for when you want to reset the counters.