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Procurve Manager - Traffic Monitoring

 
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Ronnie Hamilton_1
Frequent Advisor

Procurve Manager - Traffic Monitoring

Hi,

I have Procurve manager 2.1, and Im looking at traffice monitoring. How accurate is it and is it just the dashboard display for utilisation, broadcasts etc..
The switches must have firmware up to date for the monitoring to take place is that correct ?
I take it there is no reporting features ?
thanks
Ron
7 REPLIES 7
Steve Britt
Respected Contributor

Re: Procurve Manager - Traffic Monitoring

Ron,

Pretty much any firmware revision on a switch that supports sampling will permit traffic monitoring via sampling (versus via stats), though if you're using 54xx or 35xx switches you may want to get the latest firmware as some sFlow bugs have been fixed in these switches over the last few months. For traffic monitoring via stats any firmware revision should work on virtually any ProCurve switch model as stats mode simply relies on standard MIB counters (primarily from the interface MIB).

In PCM traffic monitoring there is a top talkers screen that you can get to by clicking the "Details" button under whichever gas gauge interests you. The gauges show you the top talker in that category during the last minute, and the top talker screen that comes up shows you what has been happening on that port for the last hour. In terms of accuracy, the "envelope" values shown are based on standard counters so they should be quite accurate; the traffic "content" estimated on sampled ports is generally accurate, although as the traffic levels drop it becomes less so (but also presumably also less interesting). I'm sure others will have more insight to offer on accuracy.

Unfortunately there is no reporting capability. What kind of reports would you like to see, over what time frame, and with what granularity (per minute, etc.)? We're always looking for ideas.

---

PCM 2.2 is supposed to release soon (June 1 I think). I suggest that you upgrade to it - I believe it's a free upgrade to people that already have PCM 2.x - as traffic monitoring was vastly restructured in it. The beta feedback for PCM 2.2 has been very positive, particularly on traffic monitoring. But there still aren't any reports, which is why your feedback here could help shape PCM 2.3 or its successors.

Regards,

SVB
Ronnie Hamilton_1
Frequent Advisor

Re: Procurve Manager - Traffic Monitoring

Steve,

I must be missing something somewere, when I choose sampling on some 2600's or 4100 I either get N/A and not able to select it or No data.
I have configured the switches to point to PCM server syslog. do I need to configure each switch in some way to send the MIB traps.
Thanks
Ron
Ronnie Hamilton_1
Frequent Advisor

Re: Procurve Manager - Traffic Monitoring

I have been diging further into this.

Would I be correct in saying that I have to create a ROMN Manager and create something for each port.
If so is the default values ok to use.
Ron
Steve Britt
Respected Contributor

Re: Procurve Manager - Traffic Monitoring

Ron,

The 2600 and 4100 are two of the ProCurve device types that don't support sampling. The ASICs in these devices are incapable of sampling. Traffic monitoring for such devices is only provided via polling interface counters and reporting the deltas every minute, which is why you're seeing "N/A" in the column that would otherwise permit you to enable sampling.

Regards,

SVB
Ronnie Hamilton_1
Frequent Advisor

Re: Procurve Manager - Traffic Monitoring

Interesting

is there anything I can do to monitor these types of switches ?

Ron
Steve Britt
Respected Contributor
Solution

Re: Procurve Manager - Traffic Monitoring

Ron,

You can still monitor the amount of traffic on these switches using PCM traffic monitoring, but no matter what tool you use there isn't any instrumentation on these particular devices that can provide visibility into the traffic content on their ports. If that's what you need you'll have to rely on instrumentation external to the devices, perhaps in switches connected to them that are capable of supporting sFlow sampling.

Regards,

SVB
Ronnie Hamilton_1
Frequent Advisor

Re: Procurve Manager - Traffic Monitoring

Steve

thanks for your input, Think I have what I need for now. I was trying to prove that we had a bottle neck having three switches trunked together for our servers, instead of having one switch. The connecting ports arent bottomin out at any point so I guess we are ok for now.

one a PCM reporting maby a report to pull port staticics into a report with friendly port names would be good.

ROnnie