Hi,
vnStat (Snap Store / snap in GitHub / source in GitHub) is a network traffic monitor which provides 5 minute, hourly, daily, monthly and yearly level statistics for selected interfaces by polling the network interface traffic counters instead of having visibility of the actual traffic. This results in minimal system resource usage regardless of the traffic rate.
I’d like to request the auto-connect of network-observe for vnstat. While I was surprised to see that list of network interfaces and the interface traffic counters are accessible without any snap interfaces connected, vnStat benefits on having also visibility of the connection speed of each network interface. For this, vnStat needs read access to /sys/class/net/*/speed (or /sys/devices/**/net/*/speed without symlinks) which is included in network-observe. The used implementation can be found from https://github.com/vergoh/vnstat/blob/master/src/ifinfo.c#L411. Without this access, users with interfaces faster than 1000 Mbit (default failsafe / sanity check value) would need to know to configure the default to a higher value to avoid traffic getting ignored due to the sanity check while users with clearly slower interfaces also would need to modify the default to avoid non-existing traffic from be counted in if an interface frequently is disabled and then enabled back again.
I’m aware that not all interface device drivers are able to provide this speed information. Having it accessible by default would however allow for the snap to behave in the same way as the install from the apt package of the same name from user’s perspective.