NPM will allow you to check for multicast activity on interfaces and page 68 of the Orion Network Performance Monitor Administrators Guide has some basics on this
If your switches support NetFlow then you could create a custom report to focus on the subnet 224.0.0.0/4 which should show levels and the sources. If you dont have NetFlow available then you could also use a SPAN or mirror port and use something like nProbe to convert the packets to flows. If you search Thwack for nProbe you will get instructions for doing this. You only need to do this on your core switches unless you want to look at specific VLANs
We are having some serious slow down in multicasting. What is is the best way to monitor this using NPM or Netflow.
Thanks
If you create an Advanced Alert trigger against the Interface type of property you should have access to the TX/RX packets/sec counter for Multicast traffic (field is under Interfaces -> Current Traffic -> Xmit/Recv Multicast Packets per second).
Now with that you could either set a threshold across the network (what you expect the minimum to be) and trigger if it falls below it, or you could create a Custom Interface Property (using the Custom Property Editor) and use that field to override any defaults for a particular interface. Something like this, where XmitMulticastMinimumis the custom interface property you created for the minimum amount of TX multicast packets/sec (you'd do the same for RX too):
Trigger Alert when ANY of the following apply
Trigger Alert when ALL of the following apply
XmitMulticastMinimum is empty Xmit Multicast Packets per second is less than 1000
Trigger Alert when ALL of the following apply
XmitMulticastMinimum is not empty field Xmit Multicast Packets per second is less than field XmitMulticastMinimum
The first condition handles default minimum packets/sec, the second one handles specific overriding thresholds. To keep it simple I'd create two alerts, one using the TX (Xmit) counter and another using RX (Recv) counter - much more flexible too. You can also just create one custom interface property (e.g. MulticastMinimum) and use that for both TX and RX, depends how flexible you want to be.
