How to know if switch has too much traffic ?

[YannickG]

Hi,

we have multiple 10/100 switches stacked together via copper gigabit links. Only one link between 2 switches.

I was wondering if I could gain some performance if I used link aggregation to stack the switches.

How can I know if my stack ports have too much traffic ?

Switches are HP 2524 and 2810-24G and some Netgear FS728TP.

Thanks

[rick jones]

If they are "managed" switches then you would use the management interface(s) to query the port statistics on a regular basis and see when/if the utilization approached link-rate.

I do not recall if the 2524 was a managed switch or not - if it has a "console" port then it is managed. The 2800's are all managed. Perusing http://www.hp.com/go/procurve should find the manuals for those switches and/or pointers to switch management software from HP. As for your Netgear stuff, well that wouldn't be this site :)

[Alan_152]

This is probably overkill, but I like to monitor my switches and switch ports using MRTG. For my purposes, averaged throughput exceeding 10% of a port's rated capacity (for instance, an average of 11Mbps going through a 100Mbps port) is too much.