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Initial Switch Port Discovery


Hi there, I'm new to NPM and looking through documentation to find some best practice when it comes to monitoring switches.

I have a largely nortel ERS 5500 network and thought i would start by monitoring uplinks only. One of the issues is that the Sonar Discovery wizard picks everything up except the port type. I have to manually go into each switch and select the trunk interfaces to monitor because the program didn't pick up any port types.

Is is common to have to manually select the switch ports (interfaces) you want to monitor?

Also, if there are any links to best practices for discovery of network equipment / servers / applications, that would be great.

  • Yes it's common to have to manually select the switch ports; it's a pain. One way you might be able to improve things is to put something useful like 'uplink' in the port description on the switch, so you can then search for switch ports a that don't have that in the description and remove them from monitoring afterwards.


    I feel that Solarwinds Discovery is bad idea if you have more than a hundred devices. Here we have a configuration management database that we store our inventory of monitored devices and interface; I have perl scripts that use that to populate Solarwinds.

  • Do you know solarwinds discovery uses to determine port type? My thought is that it would be looking for the line in the config "switchport mode whatever" and categorize based on that. However, I have two trunk ports and one is discovered when "trunk" is selected and the other is not.