RFC: NetworkManager Device Statistics (2)

[Alfonso Sanchez-Beato <alfonso sanchez-beato canonical com>]

Hi,

I have been thinking a bit more about how to expose the device statistics, and I came through two options for this:

** OPTION 1

Looking at current NM DBus interfaces, the natural way of linking an interface with a device would be to add a property to org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Device which would hold an object path, in a similar way to ActiveConnection or Ip4Config. We could add one called Statistics, which would contain an object path of the form "/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Statistics/[N]". That object path would implement the org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Device.Statistics interface, with properties as discussed in thread [1].

This fits well if the Statistics interface is dynamic, and is removed/recreated each time a connection is closed/established.

** OPTION 2

We can consider the statistics interface non-dynamic (i.e. same life cycle as Device). I actually think this is a better option because in the phone case cellular connections can easily drop and then be re-established, and it would not make sense to reset counters each time that happens (it would be difficult to track data usage). In this case it might make sense to have the interface (org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Device.Statistics) as a new interface directly implemented by the device object (/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/[N])

Thoughts?

Br,

Alfonso

[1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2016-May/msg00083.html