Along with many others, the node exporter exposes network interface metrics.

Network interface metrics have the prefix node_network_ on the node exporter's /metrics, and a device label. These are distinct from the node_netstat_ metrics which are about the kernel's network subsystem in general.

The main metrics you're probably looking for are bandwidth usage which comes from the netdev module, and is covered by node_network_receive_bytes_total and node_network_transmit_bytes_total . As bytes are the base unit, if you want bits per second you can multiply by 8 in your graphs such as rate(node_network_transmit_bytes_total[5m]) * 8 .

There's also other counter metrics from /proc/net/dev including packets , errs , drop , fifo , compressed , and multicast for both receive and transmit . colls (collisions) and carrier are in addition present only for transmit. To calculate the transmission error ratio you could use

rate(node_network_transmit_errs_total[5m]) / rate(node_network_transmit_packets_total[5m])

however this may or may not include unsuccessful sends in the denominator. As with many things in the kernel the exact meaning of these counters will vary, and what documentation there is isn't particularly illuminating so you'd need to dig through the source for the relevant driver to be sure. And even then you have to hope that this is not one of those things that also vary by hardware model/firmware version, nor that varies by kernel version. (This is incidentally a prime example of why a given metric should live entirely inside a single class/file. To share between different implementations you need a good specification that everyone follows so the metric always has the same meaning, otherwise it's not the same metric.)

In practice you can usually make your monitoring good enough without worrying about these details where metrics are unavoidably underspecified. For example if your level of errors is so high that including/excluding of errors in the denominator is significant then your graphs would have indicated that there's something wrong long before you reached that point. More than 100% errors is obviously a problem after all, and if you over-corrected in the other direction then at worst you'd be halving the true error ratio and 5% errors is a big a problem as 10%.

There's also the netclass module, which reads from /sys/class/net/ . The documentation is on kernel.org. node_network_mtu_bytes and node_network_speed_bytes are self explanatory. node_network_info has various string information about the interface and its state:

node_network_info{address="00:00:00:00:00:00", broadcast="00:00:00:00:00:00",device="lo",duplex="", ifalias="",operstate="unknown"} 1 node_network_info{address="02:52:48:00:7b:aa", broadcast="ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff",device="docker0",duplex="", ifalias="",operstate="down"} 1 node_network_info{address="3c:31:f7:91:f2:93", broadcast="ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff",device="eth0",duplex="full", ifalias="",operstate="up"} 1

node_network_up is 1 if operstate is up . node_network_dormant and node_network_link_mode can be used to tell if something like 802.1X authentication is needed for the interface to be usable.

If you want to check if your link has been flapping there's node_network_carrier_changes_total , node_network_carrier_down_changes_total and node_network_carrier_up_changes_total . As these are counters you don't have to worry about missing a flap in node_network_carrier that happens between scrapes.

node_network_iface_id is the same as SNMP's ifIndex , though if you're using the node exporter you should have no need for SNMP. node_network_address_assign_type indicates where the MAC address came from e.g. hardware, random, or set. node_network_name_assign_type is where the name of the interface came from - did you know that eth0 is no longer a thing by default?

node_network_protocol_type is the type of interface, e.g. ethernet, loopback, PPP. node_network_flags is a bitmask for flags like broadcast, multicast, promiscuous etc.

As with most metrics, many of these are only of interest for after-the-fact debugging and are not something you'd put on a dashboard or wake someone up based on.

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