new to orion - questions

Question

Hello.   New Orion user - I'm wondering to most effectively use the product, what ports I should be monitoring (I'll be monitoring all fiber switches in my enterprise).   While I wouldn't mind knowing information about all my ports on my switches, to catch such things as duplex mismatches, excessive port utilization, bad NICs etc. - I can see quickly being over run with too many up/down alerts as people power on/off their PCs throughout the day.

So I'm thinking of just monitoring all uplink/trunk ports for now.   I'm also seeing things on my switches such as VLAN interfaces, which all make sense, but other things such as "lo0" and "rif0" - what are these?

Any other tips, if relevant, would be appreciated - to get me going.

Thanks,

John

cnorborg · Answer

I would recommend just monitoring your uplinks rather than all ports, the up/downs will drive you nuts.

You can catch some things such as duplex mismatches via syslog.

Unless its a layer-3 switch, monitoring the VLAN interfaces won't give you much, unless this is a layer-3 switch.   Lo0 is a Loopback interface (normally on L3 devices) which I wouldn't monitor, not sure what rif0 is?   What model switch?   In general if you don't know what something is, you probably don't have to monitor it.  On the other hand, if you do give it a try - its pretty much harmless and maybe you'll find out something interesting...