VLANs vs Interfaces

efmartin25 · ‎03-27-2015

I'm setting up Orion 11.5 from scratch. I'm in a bit of a confused state as to if I should be monitoring the VLANs on a given switch, or the ports where devices connect that belong to those VLANs.

Or both for that matter. I'm a bit limited in that I only have a license for 250 nodes, so I have to be frugal.

Thanks for any assistance you may afford.

Eric

superfly · ‎03-31-2015

I generally don't monitor vlan's unless I have some issues. And I only monitor nodes if they're important.

So for an access switch, I would just monitor the switch and the uplinks.

efmartin25 · ‎03-31-2015

Thanks for the info Superfly99...but just to be clear, you are only monitoring a switch, and of course the uplinks to other switches, not the individual ports on that switch. Unless of course, as you put it, they are important. For me, those would be my servers.

Eric

superfly · ‎04-01-2015

Correct, I don't bother to monitor ports that have general pc's plugged into them.

wbrown · ‎03-31-2015

Generally I only monitor uplinks - I don't care about access ports. If the server admins want interface stats they can monitor the interfaces on their host.

However, if you also have NTA then you may need to monitor VLAN interfaces if you are gathering NetFlow data on a layer 3 VLAN interface.

efmartin25 · ‎03-31-2015

Thanks for the thoughts wbrown...much appreciated.

Eric