Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: <rant> Solarwinds Orion NPM is an okay tool, but when it comes to managing anything other than Cisco switches and routers, it’s very meh. It takes very little effort to get devices like that monitored to the fullest extent, but when it comes to something like a storage array, you really have to make tweaks until your fingers bleed to get the minimal monitoring functionality out of it. Even then, it doesn’t seem to perform at maximum capabilities, and misses some very fundamental reporting features. On top of that, whenever I try to google anything related to solarwinds, I get this…
KICLet: A Poison Named Solarwinds
July 27, 2012 by 5 Comments
Port Monitoring/Mirroring on NX-OS: SPAN Profiles
January 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Port mirroring is a very valuable troubleshooting tool. Cisco calls this SPAN, and it’s pretty easy to do. Cisco’s NX-OS platform does it a little differently than traditional IOS, so I wanted to briefly post a walkthrough. First, you have to set up the monitor session and configure source and destination interfaces: switch(config)# monitor session 1 switch(config-monitor)# source int port-channel 2 both switch(config-monitor)# source int port-channel 3 both switch(config-monitor)# destination interface ethernet 1/7 switch(config-monitor)# no shut switch(config-monitor)# Notice that I configured both downstream port-channels to be my source interfaces, and that I used the “both” keyword. This means that any traffic going over either port channel, in either…
Raw IP Traffic Export (RITE) on Cisco IOS
October 13, 2010 by 5 Comments
Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Often, especially in medium to large networks, it’s crucial to monitor the traffic traversing your networks. Those in the industry know that tools like tcpdump and wireshark are crucial for deeply investigating network issues. Even developers use these tools to diagnose issues with applications utilizing network resources. Many times, it is helpful to install/use one of these tools to figure out exactly what’s traversing the network, by seeing the frames and packets themselves, in a visual way. However, what if you cannot use these tools on your end devices? Many times, this type of diagnosis is needed in a highly-available datacenter-type environment,…
