Can ethtool provide the current incoming bitrate on a NIC

Is there an option in linux’s ethtool command that retrieves the current incoming bitrate or packets-per-second straight from the NIC?

Answer

Not per packets-per-second, but overall RX/TX. You could write a script around it:

ethtool -S <interface>

For example currently on my wifi nice:

[user@host ~]$ ethtool -S wlo1
NIC statistics:
     rx_packets: 992535
     rx_bytes: 1010899932
     rx_duplicates: 3206
     rx_fragments: 878057
     rx_dropped: 4367
     tx_packets: 363876
     tx_bytes: 49823636
     tx_filtered: 1
     tx_retry_failed: 6567
     tx_retries: 160017
     sta_state: 4
     txrate: 40500000
     rxrate: 54000000
     signal: 181
     channel: 0
     noise: 18446744073709551615
     ch_time: 18446744073709551615
     ch_time_busy: 18446744073709551615
     ch_time_ext_busy: 18446744073709551615
     ch_time_rx: 18446744073709551615
     ch_time_tx: 18446744073709551615

The same information could be extracted from:

• /sys/class/net//statistics/rx_packets: number of packets received
• /sys/class/net//statistics/tx_packets: number of packets transmitted
• /sys/class/net//statistics/rx_bytes: number of bytes received
• /sys/class/net//statistics/tx_bytes: number of bytes transmitted
• /sys/class/net//statistics/rx_dropped: number of packets dropped while received
• /sys/class/net//statistics/tx_dropped: number of packets dropped while transmitted

Also see superuser.com for a specific real time solution.