You can use a variety of options to change the output to include or exclude specific fields as well as change the formatting of the output altogether.Īs much of this output is RAW, it can be difficult to understand these values and what they mean to you. Notice that while this is a longer output, almost all of this information is useful, given the right circumstance. When running nstat with no additional options, you get the following results: ~]$ nstat Now that we have the basic syntax down let's take a look at the output of the command. You can view syntax information as well as options by running the -h help option. The command syntax is as follows: nstat ] The net-tools package was almost entirely deprecated in favor of the ip command suite, and you may have guessed that nstat belongs to the new package.Īlthough netstat has a more user-friendly output, the nstat command holds its own and even has a few modern tricks up its sleeve. Most command-line users are familiar with the netstat command from the net-tools package. The purpose of nstat is to pull network metrics from the kernel and display them to the user, focusing on SNMP.
However, it is prudent to know each of the commands and have a basic understanding of them so you can choose the best command for your use case. You don't need to memorize every one of these tools. To continue the statistics theme of my writing over the last several weeks, I wanted to look at another powerful tool that we can use as Linux admins. Linux system administration skills assessment.