Hi jbovee,
Thank you for your post to the Nexus ScienceLogic Community.
The reason packet collection isn't enabled by default has to do with storing very large numbers of metrics that may only occasionally be needed. There are 6 metrics collected every 5 minutes for each interface. We have customers monitoring over 1 million interfaces. If packet collection was enabled for all interfaces, we would be storing over 1.7 billion packet metrics per day. We have many customers monitoring over 100,000 interfaces and it would be over 170 million packet metrics per day for them.
I'm not sure why this isn't an option via templates. I'll tag this for the team that owns templates.
It is possible to set via the REST API under /api/device/<Device ID>/interface/<Interface ID>
Regards,
Erick