title: Windows: State and Performance of Network Interfaces
agents: windows
catalog: os/networking
license: GPLv2
distribution: check_mk
description:
 This check monitors the operational status, link speed, traffic, packet
 counts, discards and errors of network interfaces of a Windows host using
 data sent by the Checkmk agent.

 To get information about the link status and the MAC address, you need to
 deploy the agent plug-in {wmic_if.bat} into the {plugins} directory of your
 Checkmk agent for Windows. On servers with just one network interface, you
 probably won't need the information about the link status, since the agent
 will be unreachable anyway if the interface is not up. We propose to not
 install the plug-in in that case and save a few CPU resources.

 The plug-in {mk_dhcp_enabled.bat} can be used to get a WARN if the ip
 address of the interface was assigned by dhcp. To check the current state of
 Windows bonding interfaces, you need to install the agent plug-in {windows_if.ps1}
 on the target host. Without the plugin, this check will show 'Connected' as
 the operation state.

 Depending on the check parameters, this check can go WARN or CRIT when the
 port status changes (i.e. is down), when the link speed changes (e.g. a
 port expected to be set to 1 GBit/s operates only at 100 MBit/s), when the
 absolute or procentual traffic of a port exceeds certain levels or if the
 rate of errors or discards exceeds configurable limits.

 This check supports averaging the in- and outgoing traffic over a configurable
 time range by using an exponentially weighted moving average - just as Linux
 does for the CPU load averages. The averaging can be configured on a per-host
 and per-interface base. Interfaces with averaging turned on yield two additional
 performance values: the averaged in- and outgoing traffic in bytes. If you have
 configured traffic levels, then those levels are applied to the averaged values.

item:
 There are three allowed ways to specify an interface: its index, which simply
 enumerates the interfaces, its description and its alias.

discovery:
 One service is created for each interface that fulfills configurable conditions
 (rule "Network interface and switch port discovery").
 By default, these are interfaces which are currently found {Connected} and are of
 type 6, 32, 62, 117, 127, 128, 129, 180, 181, 182, 205 or 229.

 {Grouping:} In some situations, you do not want to monitor a single
 interface but a group of interfaces that together form a pool.
 This check supports such pools by defining groups. The data of all members is
 accumulated and put together in a single grouped interface service.
