Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA) Monitoring for the Virtual I/O Server

The Virtual I/O Server feature allows a virtual internal Ethernet to be connected to a real physical network one POWER5 machines.

However, monitoring the SEA network trafic is not easy and missed by most AIX tools
If you put an ID address on the SEA you only get to see the traffic to and from the Virtual I/O Server and not the traffic between the virtual and physical networks.
The only way I have found is to use the entstat command to determine what is happening.
Now the bad news - entstat just gives you the bytes transferred plus other stats and stopsand
This is nothing what we need to monitor the network online

So I wrote seastat to repeatedly use entstat and get the data in a format we need and the output looks like this (the SEA is en8 on may machine):

# seastat en8
SEA Adapter en8 Statistics
   ReadBytes   WriteBytes  ReadPackets WritePackets
           0            0            2            4
        4418         9172           30           28
       77422        78240           91           94
        3480         4320           25           26
     4795086      4798009         4895         4900
    10170726     10173124         9885         9886
    10449174     10452426        10119        10127
    10086389     10087404         9870         9863
    10329397     10328782        10111        10075
     4746088      4749022         4524         4525
        1733         5004           20           21
        1081         4070           15           20
       25854        25671           66           60
        2241         4065           30           13
        1535         3716           24           14
         930         3890           13           16

It is a simple Korn shell script: seastat shell script download

Hope this helps someone!