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Feature Suggestion - Cisco Chassis Switch Monitoring Part 2

Donald_Francis over 13 years ago

In a previous suggestion I mentioned automatically monitoring both the SP and the RP on 6500s. I would like to build on that thought.

I recently spent a lot of time looking through my chassis switches trying to figure out where a bottleneck was occurring. Building a complete picture means running through a lot of different commands for different parts of the switch.

So I thought what if Orion NPM went deeper than MEM and RP utilization and with just a single click you could get a health overview of your chassis switch. Alerts based on poor health montiors would also be helpful.

So I am talking about seeing the following in a single view (and yes I realize some of these things are not on all switches I am mostly talking about 6500s and 7Ks).

-interface output drops (a huge red flag of resource starvation)

-buffer misses/usage

-RP as well as SP utilization

-Fabric utilization (average and peak) and or blade bandwidth utilization

-Special emphasis placed on interswitch link ports vs other interfaces

-temperature

-syslog messages for the chassis you happen to be looking at

-power stats

-maybe critical resources like CAM table space where things like netflow and WCCP live and contend for space in

Overall my idea here is you could easily and quickly get a view of your switch for resource planning and especially troubleshooting. I think this could be a great tool especially for larger companies with large implementations.

0 Donald_Francis over 13 years ago

Seriously, I cannot be the only one who cares about this
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0 byrona over 13 years ago in reply to Donald_Francis

Well, to be honest when I first read it I thought it was an intriguing idea, however; I wasn't sure I was properly picturing what you had in mind or that I fully understood what you were really looking for.
This kinda sounds like a more device specific view, in this case for switches, is my understanding correct?
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0 Donald_Francis over 13 years ago in reply to byrona

Yes you are correct, for large chassis routers/switches which will typically be found in a core or an ISP.

Getting a one stop shop quick view of chassis health (or even alerts based on it) would go a LONG way in heading problems off at the pass or troubleshooting issues when they come up.
I have had several issues where I get down to watching buffers and fabric utilization and such. While the CLI gets it down a graphical representation for all resources at once would be awesome.
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0 FormerMember over 13 years ago in reply to Donald_Francis

Get the demo of Traverse http://www.zyrion.com/ It does a pretty deep dive against devices. You can also bring anything from anywhere you want into it. If you can get output you can have it picked up by, or sent to Traverse.

You can build your dashboards to have anything you want in them.

Comes at a much bigger price though.
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0 Donald_Francis over 13 years ago in reply to FormerMember

Well the whole point is I kinda want Solarwinds to do it.
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0 FormerMember over 13 years ago in reply to Donald_Francis

The more that gets added the bigger the price tag.
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0 byrona over 13 years ago

-interface output drops (a huge red flag of resource starvation)
-buffer misses/usage
-RP as well as SP utilization
-Fabric utilization (average and peak) and or blade bandwidth utilization
-Special emphasis placed on interswitch link ports vs other interfaces
-temperature
-syslog messages for the chassis you happen to be looking at
-power stats
-maybe critical resources like CAM table space where things like netflow and WCCP live and contend for space in

Donald

How many of these things are you currently able to get with Orion (albeit in different places)? I would imagine most if not all of them?

Assuming this is true, would being able to create your own custom "Views by Device Type" be a possible feature to address this need?

0 Donald_Francis over 13 years ago in reply to byrona

Not really what I am lookin for.
If I have to do all the leg work, create the views , make the custom pollers, find the MIBs, use trial and error to try to prove I have the right figures and do this for each each platform etc etc etc...
I might as well go get MRTG and not pay anything.
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0 jspanitz over 13 years ago in reply to Donald_Francis

I'll vote for this. Come to think of it, i am pretty sure I did vote for most of this in other threads.
And I agree with you, if I have to roll my own, why pay for that priveledge. Out of the box and supported is what we want.
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0 byrona over 13 years ago in reply to Donald_Francis

Not really what I am lookin for.
If I have to do all the leg work, create the views , make the custom pollers, find the MIBs, use trial and error to try to prove I have the right figures and do this for each each platform etc etc etc...
I might as well go get MRTG and not pay anything.

I understand and I think that there is a balance between included views and the ability to create your own. I would like to see some sort of "App Pack" or "Device Pack" included with the product that would have this sort of pre-canned device specific type of functionality. However; I also like the ability to create my own in the event I have an odd-ball device I need to support.