How passively monitor for tcp packet loss? (Linux)

Question

How can I passively monitor the packet loss on TCP connections to/from my machine?

Basically, I'd like a tool that sits in the background and watches TCP ack/nak/re-transmits to generate a report on which peer IP addresses "seem" to be experiencing heavy loss.

Most questions like this that I find of SF suggest using tools like iperf. But, I need to monitor connections to/from a real application on my machine.

Is this data just sitting there in the Linux TCP stack?

Answer 1

For a general sense of the scale of your problem netstat -s will track your total number of retransmissions.

# netstat -s | grep retransmited
     368644 segments retransmited

For a deeper dive, you'll probably want to fire up Wireshark.

In Wireshark set your filter to tcp.analysis.retransmission to see retransmissions by flow.

That's the best option I can come up with.

Other dead ends explored:

• netfilter/conntrack tools don't seem to keep retransmits
• stracing netstat -s showed that it is just printing /proc/net/netstat
• column 9 in /proc/net/tcp looked promising, but it unfortunately appears to be unused.

Answer 2

It looks like some guys an UNC built a utility to investigate exactly this:

Methodology

  TCP is a classic example of a legacy protocol that gets subject

to modifications. Unfortunately, evaluation of something as fundamental as TCP's loss detection/recovery mechanism is not comprehensive. Our aim is to perform a complete realistic evaluation of TCP losses and its impact on TCP performance.

I rely on passive analysis of real-world TCP connections to achieve the required level of detail and realism in my analysis.

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jasleen/Research-passivetcp.htm#Tool

Tool

The purpose of the tool is to provide more complete and accurate results for identifying and characterizing out-of-sequence segments than those provided by prior tools such as tcpanaly, tcpflows, LEAST, and Mystery. Our methodology classifies each segment that appears out-of-sequence (OOS) in a packet trace into one of the following categories: network reordering or TCP retransmission triggered by one of timeout, duplicate ACKs, partial ACKs, selective ACKs, or implicit recovery. Further, each retransmission is also assessed for whether it was needed or not.

I won't say it is production quality. Previously I've built quick perl scripts to store ip/port/ack tuples in memory and then report on duplicated data from scanning pcap output, this looks like it provides more thorough analysis.

Answer 3

these stats are in /proc/net/netstat and collectl will monitor them for you either interactively or written to disk for late playback:

[root@poker ~]# collectl -st
waiting for 1 second sample...
#<------------TCP------------->
#PureAcks HPAcks   Loss FTrans
        3      0      0      0
        1      0      0      0

of course if you'd like to see then side-by-side with networj traffic, just include 'n' with -s:

[root@poker ~]# collectl -stn
waiting for 1 second sample...
#<----------Network----------><------------TCP------------->
#  KBIn  PktIn  KBOut  PktOut PureAcks HPAcks   Loss FTrans
      0      1      0       1        1      0      0      0
      0      1      0       1        1      0      0      0

-mark