"Real-Time Location" strange or expected behaviour ?

[IanV]

Hi,

I have setup IMC to manage a customer network consisting of 3 sites. All 3 sites are connected together in a routed triangle with some nice direct metro ethernet links between them rather than a fluffy MPLS cloud. There is a service provider router at each site rather than the EES links terminating directly into the local core. IMC is installed and working out of campus A and managing the network infrastructure across the 3 sites.

Having told the customer how great the "real-time location" feature is (where IMC can tell you which switch port is associated with an IP or MAC cutting down the time to find rogue users bandwidth hogs etc), they tried it and got a report back that was, to say the least, a bit vague. The terminal/IP address in question was on, say, campus B on one of the access switches but all IMC could say for sure was that it was on the outbound (MAN/WAN) port of the core switch at campus A. This is the same result we got for all IP's that were "offsite".

Is the the real-time location feature only really for use on the same switched LAN as IMC resides? In other words does it not travel well over the routed link even if IMC has visibility of the switch MAC tables on and offsite. Does the customer need a "local" IMC installation on each site if they want to track users on their other 2 sites down to the switch port?

All contributions gratefully received.

Kind regards

Ian