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How to see errors and dropped packets on a network interface on Linux

How to see errors and dropped packets on a network interface on Linux?

Run the ip command together with the statistics option and select the network interface using the 'link' subcommand to see errors and dropped packets.

ip -stats link show ens18

The ip command can help with discovering the default gateway on a Linux system.

List the routing table

Using the -stats combined with the link subcommand, we can find statistics on a network link. This way we can see on a particular network interface how many errors or dropped packets it has.

# ip -stats link show ens18
2: ens18: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether ab:cd:ef:12:34:56 ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    RX:  bytes  packets errors dropped  missed   mcast           
    5108603572 20814332      0  789579       0       0 
    TX:  bytes  packets errors dropped carrier collsns           
    7504563480 10310495      0       0       0       0 
    altname enp0s18

This interface has no errors, but there were packets dropped.

Learn more about ip

This article uses the ip command to achieve its tasks. For this popular tool there is a cheat sheet available!

» Mastering the tool: ip

ip cheat sheet

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