Docs » Available host and application monitors » Configure application receivers for hosts and servers » Interface traffic

Interface traffic 🔗

Description 🔗

Note: This monitor is deprecated in favor of the net-io monitor. Switch to that monitor as the Smart Agent is deprecated. The net-io monitor uses the interface dimension to identify the network card instead of the plugin_instance dimension, but otherwise the metrics are the same. To learn more, see Network interface I/O.

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector provides this integration as the interface monitor for the Smart Agent Receiver.

Use this integration to collect information about the traffic (octets per second), packets per second and errors of interfaces (of course number of errors during one second).

If you’re not interested in collecting information from all interfaces, select the interfaces you want to monitor using the plugin’s configuration.

Note

This monitor is not available on Windows as collectd plugins are only supported in Linux and Kubernetes.

Benefits 🔗

After you configure the integration, you can access these features:

  • View metrics. You can create your own custom dashboards, and most monitors provide built-in dashboards as well. For information about dashboards, see View dashboards in Observability Cloud.

  • View a data-driven visualization of the physical servers, virtual machines, AWS instances, and other resources in your environment that are visible to Infrastructure Monitoring. For information about navigators, see Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring navigators.

  • Access the Metric Finder and search for metrics sent by the monitor. For information, see Use the Metric Finder.

Installation 🔗

Follow these steps to deploy this integration:

  1. Deploy the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector to your host or container platform:

  2. Configure the monitor, as described in the Configuration section.

  3. Restart the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector.

Configuration 🔗

To use this Smart Agent monitor with the Collector, include the smartagent receiver and service pipeline in your configuration file. The Smart Agent receiver is fully supported only on x86_64/amd64 platforms.

See the examples below for more details.

Configuration example 🔗

To activate this monitor in the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector, add the following to your agent configuration:

receivers:
  smartagent/interface:
    type: collectd/interface
    ...  # Additional config

To complete the monitor activation, you must also include the smartagent/interface receiver item in a metrics pipeline. To do this, add the receiver item to the service/pipelines/metrics/receivers section of your configuration file. For example:

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [smartagent/interface]

See configuration examples for specific use cases that show how the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector can integrate and complement existing environments.

Configuration settings 🔗

The following table shows the configuration options for this monitor:

Option

Required

Type

Description

excludedInterfaces

no

list of strings

List of interface names to exclude from monitoring (default: `[/^lo\d*$/ /^docker.*/ /^t(un

includedInterfaces

no

list of strings

List of all the interfaces you want to monitor, all others will be ignored. If you set both included and excludedInterfaces, only includedInterfaces will be honored.

Metrics 🔗

The following metrics are available for this integration:

Get help 🔗

If you are not able to see your data in Splunk Observability Cloud, try these tips:

To learn about even more support options, see Splunk Customer Success.