HP Network Direr Software Products manual Performance Reporting

396CHAPTER 9: PERFORMANCE REPORTING

If you do not know the MAC address, or the device in question has multiple MAC addresses, you can find the device on the 3Com Network Director map using the Edit > Find dialog box, and launch its Properties dialog box. The MAC address used by 3Com Network Director for historical data logging will be the first MAC address listed in this dialog box.

Links are handled differently depending on the end type. If the link is between two switches or hubs, then the link is identified based solely on the devices’ MAC addresses. So if the link changes, or ports or links are added to an aggregated link, any existing logged data is retained.

A link between a switch or hub and an end station or cloud is handled differently. The link is identified based on the MAC address of the switch or hub, and on the unit and port that the link is connected to on that switch or hub. This means if the end station is swapped out, and replaced with a different end station, the data is retained.

This is illustrated in the following scenarios:

An end station connected to a switch is replaced with another end station and connected to the same port.

■Data for the link is retained

■Data for the new end station starts from scratch

A switch is hot-swapped and connected up in the same fashion as the old switch.

■Data for all links starts from scratch

■Data for the new switch starts from scratch

A core link between two switches is moved from one port to another.

■Data for the connection between the two switches is retained.

Database file format Data gathered by 3Com Network Director is held in RRDTool round robin databases. See “Database” on page 391 for further details.

These files may be accessed directly via the RRDTool utility, which is located in the directory: