Ethtool collector

[ghanapunq]

Summary

Add an ethtool collector to retrieve especially the bandwidth of Mellanox boards. Indeed there was no existing plugin that supported the Mellanox connect-X5 or connect-X6. The ethtool tool gives the number of bytes received. Given this value the collector calculates the bandwidth in Gib/s and give also a percentage of the bandwidth used according to the capabilities of the board. Besides this collector provides also number of packet loss in reception and transmission. This could be useful to detect a bottleneck on a server.

Test Plan

This collector have been tested on a connect-X5 and connect-X6 on cent OS servers. As long as the ethtool is installed, this collector should give its metrics.

[ilyam8]

Hi, @ghanapunq. A question: why do we need ethtool to collect network card traffic/bandwidth? Are these network cards not showing up in /proc/net/dev output?

[ghanapunq]

Hi, @ghanapunq. A question: why do we need ethtool to collect network card traffic/bandwidth? Are these network cards not showing up in /proc/net/dev output?

The stats given by the operating system are not always relevant. If a solution uses directly the driver given (by Mellanox for instance), the operating system will be completely by passed. Whereas ethtool doesn't rely on the counters in /proc/net/dev. This tool is developped by Mellanox and therefore its metrics are relevant regarding Mellanox boards.

[ilyam8]

Can you please elaborate on "stats given by the operating system are not always relevant"?

• What stats from /proc/net/dev are not relevant and what do you mean by "not relevant"?
• Can you show both stats from /proc/net/dev and ethtool for connect-X5/6 network adapters?

[ghanapunq]

For instance on the following server here are the metrics I have

[root@poc-servers]# cat /proc/net/dev &&  ethtool -S enp66s0f0 | grep x_bytes_phy
Inter-|   Receive                                                |  Transmit
 face |bytes    packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes    packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
enp66s0f0: 2685980250 2465952    0 1619568    0     0          0   2465952  9542140  108278    0    0    0     0       0          0
     tx_bytes_phy: 28715066441978
     rx_bytes_phy: 12292535778310

You can see that number of bytes measured by ethtool and the one given in /proc/net/dev are completely different.

For your information I am using the following setup:

[root@poc-server]# lspci -v | grep -i Mellanox
42:00.0 Ethernet controller: Mellanox Technologies MT2892 Family [ConnectX-6 Dx]

[root@poc-server]# cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS Linux release 7.9.2009 (Core)

[ghanapunq]

Hello @ilyam8 , could you tell me what is needed to have a review concerning this pull request ?
And concerning the fail of the job "Review / flake8" I don't understand what is failing.

[Ferroin]

And concerning the fail of the job "Review / flake8" I don't understand what is failing.

Check the ‘Files Changed’ tab on the PR. All of the ‘Review’ jobs add in-line annotations on the files for any issues they flag (in this case, it mostly looks like formatting issues, plus an unused import).

Alternatively, you can install flake8 locally and run it against the file, it should report the same warnings there as it is in CI.

[andrewm4894]

Suggested change

	custom_edit_url: https://github.com/netdata/netdata/edit/master/collectors/python.d.plugin/nvidia_smi/README.md
	custom_edit_url: https://github.com/netdata/netdata/edit/master/collectors/python.d.plugin/ethtool/README.md

[andrewm4894]

Suggested change

	title: "Nvidia GPU monitoring with Netdata"
	title: "Network with ethtool monitoring with Netdata"

[andrewm4894]

Suggested change

	sidebar_label: "Nvidia GPUs"
	sidebar_label: "ethtool"

[andrewm4894]

Suggested change

	# Description: nvidia-smi netdata python.d module
	# Description: ethtool netdata python.d module

[Ferroin]

Authorship information needs to be updated.

[ilyam8]

Hi, @ghanapunq. Indeed, I see that counters from /proc/net/dev and ethtool -S don't match. And it looks like ethtool provides additional counters for Mellanox.

Thanks for the PR, but I think we are not going to merge it:

• We are migrating python collectors to go.
• We don't add new python collectors unless there are technical restrictions on their implementation in go (e.g. using CGO).

If you are interested in this feature - please open a feature request.

If you want to share your implementation, you can:

• create a repo with this collector and add it to the list of third-party collectors.
• or/and add it to netdata/community/collectors/python.d.

[Ferroin]

Not exactly critical, but could we extend this to take a regex for the device filter? That would allow us to default to ^eth.*|^en[ops].*, which should limit things to actual Ethernet devices on a vast majority of systems and would mean that most users would not need to set a custom device filter.

If it’s an issue here we could always just do it in a followup PR instead.

[andrewm4894]

create a repo with this collector and add it to the list of third-party collectors.

I think that link is broken - this is the list here. https://github.com/netdata/netdata/blob/master/collectors/COLLECTORS.md#third-party-collectors

[ghanapunq]

I created a third party collector as proposed by @ilyam8. It is available here : https://github.com/ghanapunq/netdata_ethtool_plugin

Should I add it to the list of third party collector or do you prefer to do it @ilyam8 ?

[ilyam8]

@ghanapunq please do

[ghanapunq]

@ilyam8 here is a mini PR to add the ethtool collector in the third party collectors : #14753