In reply to Chris Oggerino.

The best practice for an on-box Python automation use case would be to use the "cli" Python module that we provide within our built in Python interpreter on the guestshell.

That will allow you to get the eth ports packets counters, and accordingly, your script's logic will take some actions - I.E: send you an e mail, write an alert in a Spark room, etc. (The sky is the limit here, really :-))