RMON and the Switch 55
addition, probes record the behavior of your ne twork, so that you can
analyze the causes of problems.
■It reduces the load on the network and the management
workstation
Traditional network management involves a management wo rkstation
polling network devices at regular intervals to gather statistics and
identify problems or trends. As network sizes and traffic levels grow,
this approach places a strain on the managemen t workstation and
also generates large amounts of traffic.
RMON, however, autonomously looks at the network on behalf of the
management workstation without affecting the charact eristics and
performance of the network. RMON reports by e xception, which
means that it only informs the management workstation when the
network has entered an abnormal state.
RMON and the Switch
The RMON support provided by your Switch 4200 is detailed in Tab l e 4.
When using the RMON features of the Switch, note the following:
■After the default sessions are created, they have no special status. You
can delete or change them as required.
■The greater the number of RMON sessions, the greater the burden on
the management resources of the Switch. If you hav e many RMON
sessions, the forwarding performance of the Switch is not affected but
you may experience slow response times from the web interface.
Tabl e 4 RMON support supplied by the Switch
RMON group Support supplied by the Switch
Alarms A new or initialized Swit ch has the following alarm(s) defined for
each port:
■Percentage of errors over one minute
You can modify these alarms using an RMON management
application, but you cannot create or delete them.
You can define up to 200 alarms for the Switch.
For more information about the alarms setup on the Switch, see
“Alarm Events” on page 56 and “The Default Alarm
Settings” on page5 6.
Events A new or initialized Switch has Events defined for use with the
default alarm system. See “The Default Alarm Settings” on
page 56 for more informa tion.