Monitoring a switch

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jan 8, 2013, at 10:30 AM, Andrea Venturoli wrote:
> I'm looking for some software which can monitor a SNMP-enabled switch.

Well, it's likely that the switch vendor offers some tools.

> Sure I can use Cacti to monitor bandwidth of every single port... or Nagios to warn me if some port gets some defined amount of traffic for a defined amount of time...

Yes, those are reasonable starting points.

> I was wondering though, if there was some more specific tool which might be faster to setup and would do some magic automatically, like computing the total traffic flowing through, identifying bottlenecks, etc...

Sure.  What's your budget?

Something like HP's OpenView (which I just learned was rebranded to "HP Network Management Center"), or Cisco's LAN Management stuff (evidently also rebranded) do all sorts of nice network discovery and autoconfig, routing/traffic bottleneck analysis, etc.  They also cost 5 to 6-digit sums, but if you've got multiple WAN links between data centers to manage, or some complicated VM/cloud architecture, they're probably worth the price.

(Of course, if you've just got "a" meaning "one" switch to manage, that would be overkill.)

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck