What is the psutil.net_io_counters() method?

The psutil module

The psutil (Python system and process utilities) is a Python package that retrieves information on ongoing processes and system usage (CPU, memory, storage, network, and sensors). We mainly use it for system monitoring, profiling, restricting process resources, and process management.

The module can be installed via pip as follows:

pip install psutil

The net_io_counters method

The net_io_counters method returns the system wide network input/output statistics in the form of counters as a tuple. The different counters returned are as follows:

Field name Description
bytes_sent The number of bytes sent.
bytes_recv The number of bytes received.
packets_sent The number of packets sent.
packets_recv The number of packets received.
errin The total number of errors while receiving the packets.
errout The total number of errors while sending the packets.
dropin The total number of incoming packets that were dropped.
dropout The total number of outgoing packets that were dropped.

Method signature

psutil.net_io_counters(pernic=False, nowrap=True)
  • pernic: If True, the method returns the same information for all the different network interface cards on the system.
  • nowrap: On some systems, such as Linux, the numbers reported by the kernel may overflow and wrap on an extremely busy or long-lived system. Setting nowrap to True adjusts the values such that it increases or remains the same but never decreases.

Example

import psutil
print("psutil.net_io_counters() = ", psutil.net_io_counters())

Explanation

  • Line 1: We import the psutil module.
  • Line 3: We retrieve the current network IO statistics and print them to the console.

Free Resources

License: Creative Commons-Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC-BY-SA 4.0)