Live Connections not trustworthy (related to no iftop)

In another thread about the Advanced Shell going away, it's been mentioned that you can use Live Connections instead of going to the Advanced Shell and using something like iftop. I've been trying Live Connections and while it's nice and has some advantages, I simply don't trust it.

1. It says Kbps, but it is apparently indicating KBps. This immediately drops trustworthiness when basic units of measure are confused by the manufacturer. I'd also add that the numbers are not exactly a bits-bytes difference, though that might be due to different averaging periods or something. That just clouds the picture further.

2. When you have it on a 5-second refresh, it evidently gathers statistics for a fraction of a second, every 5 seconds. With spikey traffic, it will be misleading. For example, I can be staring at a device that's receiving a video stream and on an otherwise nearly-idle network the device shows no traffic at all. This doesn't happen for continuous streams -- like a VOIP stream -- but for variable-compression-rate video that's bursty in nature (between compression density and buffering) a device can be invisible to Live Connections.

If you watch the "bars" in iftop you could also miss some things, but it also gives you values averaged over different time periods so you can see beyond spikes. (Plus you can afford to run it with updates every second or twice a second so you're less likely to miss spikes.)

Not saying that Advanced Shell has to stick around, per se, but Live Connections isn't yet fully baked. Or maybe the CLI needs to have access to some form of fast-updating iftop or something like that.



Clarified "past" to mean "beyond" not "historical".
[edited by: Wayne Folta at 8:38 PM (GMT -8) on 16 Jan 2022]
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  • Thanks! I appreciate it.

    I was again looking at Live Connections and streaming video last night and it is as bad as I thought. Spikey traffic can go for surprisingly long periods showing no traffic at all. Sometimes I suspect the traffic is being mis-classified from time to time, when I look at Application traffic. But my main use case is User Name because that's the only way in the system to really identify devices, by name, that I care about. And that will definitely show a device having no activity 8 or 9 times out of 12 intervals in a minute, when I know that it is getting spiky traffic that spikes as high as 2Mb/s.

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