Units of Measure on Network Traffic Graph

[ryantw]

I was surprised to find that the network traffic graph in the PVE web interface is in bytes rather than bits.

Feature request: Change this to bits, or at least make it configurable / changable in the interface.

It would be easier to have this at the same scale as the line rate of network interfaces rather than do the mental calculations between bytes and bits.

Does anybody out there prefer bytes for network monitoring? I can understand wanting this to be comparable to the disk throughput, but I'm not sure if there are other benefits to this scale.

 

[desotech]

You are right, Proxmox VE shows network traffic in bytes per second, which is consistent with how it shows disk I/O. The reasoning is that the backend (RRD database and collectd) stores values in bytes, and the web UI reuses the same logic for both disk and network throughput. This makes sense from a developer standpoint, but it is not what most people expect when looking at network utilization, since network hardware, ISPs, and interface line rates are always specified in bits per second (Mbit/s, Gbit/s).
At the moment there is no option in the PVE web GUI to switch between bytes and bits. If you want to see network traffic in bits/s you have two options. First, you can use external monitoring tools like Grafana, Zabbix or Prometheus with node_exporter or pve-exporter, where you can configure the units however you like. Second, if you stick with the PVE GUI, you would need to patch the frontend JavaScript to change the graph scaling, but this is not supported officially and would be overwritten by updates.
So to answer your question, no, most people prefer bits when it comes to network monitoring, especially when they want to compare to NIC speeds. Bytes is mostly used for disk I/O consistency. It’s a good feature request, and you are not the first one to raise it. The clean solution would be to make this configurable in the PVE interface so users can choose whether to display bytes or bits, just like some monitoring tools already allow.

 

[bennetgallein]

Facing the same mental struggel to convert between units when debugging networking issues, I've build a small little Requestly (https://requestly.com/) middleware that just multiplies by 8.

https://app.requestly.io/rules#shar...c3aa9b968d19a6b8e1-Proxmox-netin-out-to-bytes

 

[Onslow]

No matter whether developers decided on bits or on Bytes, they should place on the graph the unit they chose: "b/s" or "B/s" (or "p"(p like per) for "/" )

Not typing the physical unit on a graph automatically brought down the test grade at my schools