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Rmon

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AyrishGrl

Technical User
Feb 14, 2005
129
US
I need to set up Rmon on a Passport to track down or eliminate network issues. Is rmon a good way to track traffic utilization and port errors? I have never set it up before. Does enabling this cause any stress on CPU ultilization? I have a list of ports that are in question and I don't want to enable this on all of them if it is going to cause any further issues with the Passport itself.
 
Do you have mrtg or Nortel Optivity ?
Rmon sucks up memory;the more monitoring you do the more memory.
What about mirroring a port and using a sniffer ?

Rick Harris
SC Dept of Motor Vehicles
Network Operations
 
We are looking at possibly implementing Optivity. The problems we are seeing are intermittent and I wanted to monitor utilization over a period of time. I also want to see if the port takes any sort of errors at the same time. This way I can check the logs for a certain time period that users complain about having problems. So, would you recommend only monitoring a single port at a time? Also, how can I check current CPU utiliztion and memory stats from the CLI?
 
What rev code are you running ?

Rick Harris
SC Dept of Motor Vehicles
Network Operations
 
Forgot to ask this: How much memory installed in switch fabric ? Do you have single or dual cpu's ?

Rick Harris
SC Dept of Motor Vehicles
Network Operations
 
Dual CPUs and it looks like we have 128M RAM.
 
This is from memory..... I think with that code you need 256 mb memory installed on each cpu.

Rick Harris
SC Dept of Motor Vehicles
Network Operations
 
OK. How can I check the memory installed on the cpu?
 
Telnet to 8600;cli command show sys perf. Will return active cpu stats.

Rick Harris
SC Dept of Motor Vehicles
Network Operations
 
Which Passport are wanting to use this on? I have been running this on our Passport 8600s using 128MB SF and running 3.5.8 code with no problems for over a year now. My CPU utilization usually doesn't exceed 10% and memory utilization is at about 30-35%. This is on our busiest system at the core of our network. I have found it to be very useful for gathering utilization stats to our monitoring system. We don't use Optivity. We tested it twice and found it lacking.

Good Luck,

Googer
 
Googer - Currently I have RMON hist turned on for one port. I am reviewing the stats and having a bit of a problem interpreting them. For example in the first bucket I see:

SampleIndex 42
Utilization 0.4
Octets 90,583,282
Pkts 224,397
BroadcastPkts 10
MulticastPkts 00
DropEvents 00
CRCAlignErrors 00
UndersizePkts 00
OversizePkts 00
Fragments 00
Collisions 00

Is the utilization 0.4%? Is that utilization of the port or of the total switch?

Also, in the last bucket recorded there is always a large number of broadcast packets listed (123,705) and 119 CRCs. However these numbers are always bumped to the last bucket each time a new reading is taken. So, I guess I need to know each time a reading is taken what exactly are the counters reporting? Are the buckets cumlitative? Is it just a snapshot of the counters at that moment? I would like to eventually setup threshold alarms to alert us when a certain port starts getting hammared, but need to establish a baseline first.

I've been trying to get these answers out of Nortel, but I am getting nothing remotely useful from the tech. Thanks.
 
I'm not sure on how to read those either. I pass all my RMON to our NetScout system which makes very easy to read.

Sorry I can't be more helpful.

Googer

 
OK - thanks. I wonder if passing the data to Optivity would do the same? Of course we still have to get Optivity installed and running. We are also trying to get a liscense to Solarwinds Engineer edition. Until then I guess I will just montior the error stats and go from there. Thanks for the info.
 
Solar Winds will not do a lot for a 8600. Solar Winds engineering could not get a lot of information fron Nortel.
A Mib walk shows some stuff,but it's not in depth.
T performance tab in Optivity is in depth.

Rick Harris
SC Dept of Motor Vehicles
Network Operations
 
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