Looking for a quick way to get a count of all active interfaces on a Cisco switch

hnieman

We're doing some Network infrastructure upgrades, and I need to do some capacity planning on the existing infrastructure.  I need a quick and easy way to get the active port count on a 40+ Cisco 3750 switches that are a mix of stand alone and stacked.

I'm sure someone here can point me in the right direction.

rschroeder

Oh, there are so MANY ways to do this.  Let's start simple:

• User Device Tracker has a Report that shows this exact information.  Just ensure UDT is monitoring all your switch ports and your'e set.
• If you don't have UDT, I bet you have NCM.  Manually script a job that contains "sho int status | in connect" and run it manually on all the switches you want.
• Take that same NCM manual job and turn it into a scheduled job, configure it to auto run on a schedule, and configure it to e-mail you the results.  You just set it and forget it.  You'll have your report e-mailed to you Inbox as soon as you want.
• Follow my instructions here:  How to create a report displaying the Last Time Data was Transmitted or Received on a Switch Port  and customize the process to include all your switches instead of just one.  Not only will you see all the ports that are inactive, but you'll automatically know HOW LONG they've been inactive.  You don't want a report that misses someone's port just because they took their laptop to lunch, do you?  I use this report weekly, and the other five guys on my team use it almost that often as well.  It's a real money-saver, enabling us to unpatch ports that have been inactive for a long time and re-purpose them for new devices.
• Fire up the Engineer's Tool Set, do a ping sweep of all the subnets on the switches you want port info about (to refresh the ARP cache and MAC-address tables), then point Switch Port Mapper at all the switches you want.  Export to Excel and sort on port status.  Filter out Critical and you'll have the active ports for the switch.  Or filter specifically FOR Critical interface status and you'll have the count of ports currently down.  Switch Port Mapper can even include columns for Last Time Data Received and Last Time Link Active (or the equivalent).
• Or just SSH to every switch (you could automate this with a batch file) and include in the script "show int status | in connected".  You'll see exactly which ports have link.

There are probably canned Inventory reports in NPM/NCM that will also show this info, not to mention other brands of tools to use besides SW.

Here's hoping one or more of these work for you!

Swift Packets!

Rick Schroeder