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Switchport Capacity Planning

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This could potentially be a new feature request, and that is a way to monitor switch port capacity on a switch?

eg: You have a 48 port switch with all ports patched, but how do you know what ports could be re-purposed.

I had thought of using SNMP sensors for each port, but that would use up a sensor license for each port. In this example that would use up 48 licenses out of the total license count.

Then I thought about using SNMP up/down status, and a channel for each port. So a single sensor would have 48 channels.

So my question is, what's the best way to get a historical report of switchport up/down status for capacity planning purposes?

I don't need to get alerts on a port up/down status , just check the port status on a schedule and record it for reporting purposes.

I think this is something PRTG should/could be able to do very easily. (Otherwise I'll have to start looking at my Ansible install again)

There must be lots of PRTG users that would want to know if their switch ports weren't being used, rather than buying new switches.

add-feature add-sensor capacity cisco feature-request improve-prtg prtg-kbtracker switch switchport

Created on Apr 29, 2022 2:06:33 AM



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Hello There
Thank you for reaching us. The question you are asking would have multiple answers depending on what is important for you to monitor.
Yes, we do have different sensors that could monitor a Switch most of them are SMTP-based and would require 1 sensor per interface of the SW. This would consume some licenses, but at the same time would provide more information regarding the use of this interface.
Have the SNMP traffic Sensor, It will show the traffic in/out (along with some other metrics) for each interface. This report would help multiple users to get the information they need about this Device/interface port utilization and capacity.
At the end of the day, this sensor's report would perform better for some customers than others.
Again it would depend on your needs. Since you don't need to get alerted from UP/Down status, you could just disable the notification for this particular sensor, while keeping the reporting still active.

Created on May 4, 2022 11:43:50 PM by Luis Quesada (Paessler Technical Support)




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