Unused switch port report for 1/3 months

Hi,

We have around 500 access switches in our network. Our management
periodically needs to know how many of these ports are not used for a
month / 3 month period so that the ports can be reused. What is the
best way to achieve this as we are looking for 24,000 ports
periodically and manually this is not possible.

I can think of the following options and this where i am stuck on
those:
1. Perl has a way to extract information from the switch. I am more
into networking so dont know much about how to implement it, but i
know there exists one as i have seen it being used.
2. We can use MIB'to collect the port status and last uptime status,
but not sure which one to use.
3. We can use some ready tools for this, not sure which one

It would be great if anyone can help out here. Most of the switches
are 2950 and 4500 series.

Cheers,
Jowan.

 

I don't happen to have copy/paste capabilities to the way I'm posting
right at the moment or I would copy in an exact URL.

I suggest that you go to google groups and review the (one) hit
you would get by searching for

group:comp.dcom.sys.cisco author:roberson unused port

 

Maybe check out the solar winds orion tool, but may be overkill for one
application.

 

I also like SolarWinds Orion and enjoy how the data is available for 3rd
party application use through its standard Microsoft SQL database format.
Orion collects the data and ASP webpages display it however desired!

MRTG is a free traffic graphing application that can accumilate your traffic
statistics. If you get it running and have it monitor all of the switch
ports, not just the ones up at initial running, then you can accumilate data
of port data activitiy.

MRTG has been around for a while and relies on SNMP for collecting data.
Make sure you read up on SNMP security: using a non-default community string
and specifing an access list in the SNMP server command to designate what IP
addresses can access that individual device via SNMP.

If you really do get MRTG running for at least one switch and are happy with
it, I can advise you on easily deploying it for 500 switches. Perl
scripting generated seperate MRTG configuration files, one for each device
in a seperate webserver directory. A single index page referred to each
device subdirectory for viewing.

 

Hm - if this is the only desired data acquisition, I would use perl and
snmp to check the status of every interface lets say every hour and
write the results into s RDBMS. This way you can create customized
reports using SQL or create a webapp to impress the boss ;-)

Maybe you can use traffstats (http://traffstats.sourceforge.net/). It
uses SNMP to collect traffic statistics and stores it all in a mysql db.
Then you may write your own small tool targeting the db with your
customized sql queries.

Klaus

 

If you don't fancy re-inventing the wheel on this, there's always Zabbix.
It offers a massive amount of flexibility in what you do with polled SNMP
data, the flipside being that it can be a bit complicated to get your
head around the templating system. You could very easily create a
template in Zabbix that polls devices for the ifOperStatus of each port,
at whatever frequency you like [once a minute, once an hour, once a day,
once every 325 seconds if you like]. You can then tell it how long to
store the value in the database before expiring. As it uses MySQL for
backend storage, a report detailing switchport utilisation could be
literally < 10 lines of Perl or PHP.

 

Hi,

Currently i'm evaluating accelops, it has a default report for this task. The report is adjustable to whatever time frame you need.

In the mean time, as this is an old post, did you get a working solution for you situation?

Regards,

Egbert


Op woensdag 3 september 2008 16:42:27 UTC+2 schreef Jowan: