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Time since last data received

Hi Folks,

I'm looking for a tool to reliably tell me about historical interface status activity, ie how long an interface has been unused for. I've been round all the houses with regards to the iflastchange oid and 'sysuptime' rollover etc. For some useful information for what I'm talking about see here:

https://supportforums.cisco.com/message/573244#573244

Anyway I noticed that in NCM there is an attempted to get around the short comings of Cisco's bugs with the inclusion of the columns 'time since last data receive/transmit'. Unfortunatley for me this feild doesn't seem to have data against every interface on my devices and most of the interfaces that are blank for this column are the down interface (the ones I'm most likely to be interested in). I have read in a previous post that this was a known issue to SW but I don't know whether it was fixed. Does anyone know why some interfaces are blank?

I would also like to know how this information is acquired, we have the polling service in NCM disabled so I guess it must be gathered every time the inventory runs. What are the OID's used to get the info? This looks like it could be a potential solution to the Cisco bugs mentioned above so I'm am extremely eager to get this working, or at least understand how it's populated.

Thanks :-)

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Accepted answers

fcaron

News about the empty NCM fields:

We were able to reproduce the same issue on our side on some devices inside test lab. NCM use the following MIB to get this data:

- Time since last data received: OLD-CISCO-INTERFACES-MIB:locIfLastIn

- Time since last data transmitted: OLD-CISCO-INTERFACES-MIB:locIfLastOut

We display an empty field when the value we get is "-1" from the device. You can do a mib walk and verify that this is indeed the issue in your environment. If this is the case, there is not much we can do about that.

All comments

mcbridea

Hi Ciag,

It looks like you are trying to understand how many idle interfaces you have and how long they have been idle. Is this the case?

Andy

Ciag

Hi Andy,

thanks for your reply.

Ultimately yes, I need to reliabley and acurately know how long an interface has been dormant for.

But I would aslo like to understand how NCM gets the info for 'time since last data recieved/Transmit' and why it doesn't show any stats for certain interfaces. Which you can see in the image below.

fcaron

Hi Ciag,

I'll ask about the NCM question.

If you have NPM, there is also a possibility to create a custom report that highlights # of bytes transmitted by interfaces over a period of time.

So by running this over, say, 1 month and sorting it by #of bytes, it should be easier to identify those interfaces that had no traffic during this month.

We are working with another NPM user on that. Are you interested?

Ciag

Thanks for your reply,

Unfortunately NPM was ruled out almost straight away for this. NPM only reports on interfaces in it's database. At present we only monitor 'UpLink' interfaces which account for over 5500 interfaces on our network.

I need to be able to look at a 'down' interface and say this hasn't been used for X amount of time so we can safely depoly it on the network. As mentioned the iflastchange mib should be able to do this but it's becomes inaccurate once the sysuptime counter has rolled over/ after 496 days and is completely useless after multiple rollovers.

What is needed is an external database to record this data which keeps it's own time stamps and is seperate from the sysuptime rollover issue on the Cisco devices. That's why it would have been very handy if NCM was acurately keeping track of the last time data was received or transmitted on an interface.

cheers