Procurve 4000 Management?

[David_611]

I have the typical dilemma of a group of programmers blaming the network for their slow application performance. Everything else runs just fine so I believe the problem is within their custom app/servers. This group of servers is attached to a ProCurve 4000M. Is there an easy way to check utilization of this switch to determine if everything is flowing as it should during their tests or do I need to create a monitor port and use a Sniffer? I need some ideas quick!! Thx!! David@Rocketmail.com

[Ron Kinner]

I've never used it but it appears that TopTools which came on a CD with your 4000M should help. See Chapter 5 in your
Management and Configuration Guide for the HP Procurve Switches 1600M, 2424M, 4000M, and 8000M
(September 1999)

http://www.hp.com/rnd/support/manuals/8000_4000_2424.htm

Or you can use getif http://www.wtcs.org/snmp4tpc/testing.htm or mrtg http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/. Both are freeware and mrtg draws really cute graphs of traffic on each port. Getif is quicker to setup but mrtg is better for longterm.

You can test your throughput with Qcheck:

http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-8079207-8-8737728-1.html

However, sticking a sniffer on the switch is not such a bad idea. The programmers will probably need the information to get their app working correctly anyway.

I trust you have already manually set their connections to 100 full or whatever their box can support (on both ends of each circuit!) so we can rule out a genuine problem?

Ron

[OLARU Dan]

As a simple alternative to what Ron said, you could use the SWT's own reporting capability. After telnetting into the SWT, press 1, 5, select the port you want to see data about, select "Show details". Data in this window (Status and counters - Port Counters - Port ??) is updated every 3 seconds or so. Here you have everything you need to decide on the health of the port at Layer 2.

You can obtain the same data in a nicer format if you use the web agent on the SWT and a browser on your monitoring station. Establish an http connection with the IP address of the SWT and search for the window containing the port's details. Some time ago I disabled the web agent on all SWTs (there were too many http servers on my network!) - so I can't tell you more details.

About HP TopTools: on the CD that arrived with the SWT you'll find vrsion 5.0, but the latest version available from HP site is 5.6. After installing 5.0, my PC became sluggish and remained so even after un-installing TopTools. As a "bonus", the install program also installed IIS-nonPatched Edition on my station. I'm not using it any more (though it's free), and I presently test trial versions of network monitoring tools from SolarWinds and FlukeNetworks to make my mind about a purchase.

Cheers.