Extreme Networks Summit1 manual Rmon and the Switch

STATUS MONITORING AND STATISTICS

ALARMS

The Alarms group provides a versatile, general mechanism for setting threshold and sampling intervals to generate events on any RMON variable. Both rising and falling thresholds are supported, and thresholds can be on the absolute value of a variable or its delta value. In addition, alarm thresholds may be autocalibrated or set manually.

Alarms inform you of a network performance problem and can trigger automated action responses through the Events group.

EVENTS

The Events group creates entries in an event log and/or sends SNMP traps to the management workstation. An event is triggered by an RMON alarm. The action taken can be configured to ignore it, to log the event, to send an SNMP trap to the receivers listed in the trap receiver table, or to both log and send a trap. The RMON traps are defined in RFC 1757 for rising and falling thresholds.

Effective use of the Events group saves you time. Rather than having to watch real-time graphs for important occurrences, you can depend on the Event group for notification. Through the SNMP traps, events can trigger other actions, providing a mechanism for an automated response to certain occurrences.

RMON AND THE SWITCH

RMON requires one probe per LAN segment, and standalone RMON probes have traditionally been expensive. Therefore, Extreme’s approach has been to build an inexpensive RMON probe into the agent of each switch. This allows RMON to be widely deployed around the network without costing more than traditional network management. The Summit accurately maintains RMON statistics at the maximum line rate of all of its ports.

For example, statistics can be related to individual ports. Also, because a probe must be able to see all traffic, a stand-alone probe must be attached to a nonsecure port. Implementing RMON in the switch means that all ports can have security features enabled.

12-16 SUMMIT SWITCH INSTALLATION AND USER GUIDE