How are you using NPM to detect loops?

Question

I know there is no easy way to detect where a loop is in the network once it occurs but I was wondering what others were doing with NPM to help detect when a loop may be occurring and how they were leveraging NPM to try to narrow down the troublesome area of the network.

Lertsa · Answer

We have a pretty large Cisco L2 network and as for loops, we use BPDUGuard and PVST to block them. Once a message about a loop appears on syslog, it sends an e-mail alert.

If no alerts have been sent and there is still a loop (shows up as excessive broadcasts/traffic), I use real-time interface monitor from Solarwinds Engineer's Toolset to track the source of the broadcasts.