Monitor Switch Port Bandwidth

[Razor]

First of all, Hello to everyone, I have been using Zabbix now for about 6 months and I find it a great product. However I have recently changed jobs and my new boss is asking me to use Zabbix in a manner to which I have not done before.

I have implemented Zabbix in a test situation, to show him how well the product works, however after his initial look at it he feels that it does not meet our needs as it does not have the ability to monitor traffic going through a port on the switch in a manner that he would like to see it.

What he would like to see is either the data on how much traffic is going in and out of the port (which I know zabbix does), but more importantly he would like to know the utilization on the port itself. IE if a 1 Gig port is at 80% utilization he would like to be notified of that. Same with 100Mb and 10 Mb ports

I have read through other posts in the forum and I have tried several things after reading them, but they still do not seem to cover off what I am looking for.

I appreaciate your patients as I am sure this has already been covered, but not in a manner to which I can get working.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[richlv]

grab item data, then create trigger if bps exceeds some limit ?
define the trigger so that it does not trigger on short spikes but only if traffix exceeds nn% for some time and it should work fine, i guess.

[Razor]

I'll tell you what I have right now,

I am currently getting data on ifHCInOctets I then have a trigger that is written like this

{test:ifHCInOctets.1.min(#2)}>0.60*{test:ifHighSpe ed.1.max(#2)}

The problem is that when I monitor the port through the switch interface I can see how much bandwidth in a percentage is being used. I set my trigger for 38% usage and then start transferring a file (4 gig worth), I monitor the percentage on the switch, and I notice that it will peak at about 45% usage, however the trigger being set for 38 never fires.

So I am wondering, is my trigger wrong, or is the way the switch calculates port utilization different from the way I am doing it.

[richlv]

i don't see how exactly you set a trigger to 38% bandwidth usage.
trigger expression you showed doesn't seem to do that - it would fire if difference in last two values exceeds 40% or so (if i'm reading it correctly), and maybe could be simplified using delta function.

[Kerrygeek]

That looks like the hard way to do it. I just did something similar last week on the WAN ports on some routers. If you have a switch port that is 100 megs, just monitor the bandwidth on that port as you mentioned then set a trigger to fire at 60 megs if that's the threshold you want.

I set 2 different triggers for the routers I was watching, one at 50% of a T1 and one at 75% of a T1. Here's what mine looks like for 750k, approx. half of a T1:

{name of router:ifInOctets1.last(0)}>750000

If you look at some of the Cisco templates, they have samples of triggers similar to this.

Hope that helps!
Kerry