VIOS entstat versus seastat for SEA

UNIX AIX
1

Hello,
I found that the packet counts given by entstat -d SEA is not the same as the total of the packet counts given by seastat -d SEA for the same interval of time.
Do anyone have an explanation for the difference. We recently got a recommendation that the throughput on an SEA should not exceed 250,000 packets/second, and we were wondering which one of the statistics we could monitor between entstat and seastat. Below is an example of the difference in count:

# lsdev | grep Shared
 ent15          Available             Shared Ethernet Adapter
 ent18          Available             Shared Ethernet Adapter
 # chdev -l ent18 -a accounting=enabled
 ent18 changed

Reset of the stats

seastat -d ent18 -c
 entstat -r ent18 
 sleep 60; 
 seastat -d ent18 |grep Packets | awk '{ SUM += $2} END { print SUM " packets_Transmit_per_second" }'
 seastat -d ent18|grep Packets | awk '{ SUM += $4} END { print SUM " packets_Receive_per_second" }'
 entstat -d ent18
 RESULTS seastat
1016 packets_Transmit_per_second
1748 packets_Receive_per_second 
   
 RESULTS entstat
 Transmit Statistics:                          Receive Statistics:
 --------------------                          -------------------
 Packets: 3329                                 Packets: 4135
 Bytes: 1938358                                Bytes: 2348071
 Interrupts: 33                                Interrupts: 3229
2

netstat starts counting when the system boots, however sea statistics need to be enabled exclusively. difference between the counters points that sea was enabled after a while system was booted.

3

Yes niyazi, that is why i both reset the counters for entstat (-r) and seastat (-c) so that to compare if the values match. And they do not math at all.

4

sorry, i missed that you clear the stats.

so it looks like you have lpar to lpar traffic which does not go through physical network switch. PowerVM is forwarding traffic internally, so seastat counts the packets, however entstat will not count them since they do not actually go over physical interface.

5

Thank you. That could be a good explanation, however, did you mean the reverse:
i.e
seastat counts only packets going in/out physical interface
while
entstat counts all packets, even those forwarded internally?
Because I see entstat values are higher than seastat values.

6

seastat output is per second, entstat is total. so you need to multiply seastat output by 60. eventually it will make sense.

ps. by lpar to lpar i mean on the same power machine.