switch error monitoring

[jthomas]

Hello everyone.

I have Nagios set up with all of the basic settings found in the quick start guide.
I also have MRTG set up and working with Nagios to monitor switch port bandwidth. However, I am unable to move beyond this point, at least when it comes to monitoring switches.

I believe a couple of our older switches are on their last leg and are possibly throwing out errors but I am unsure how to check for this using Nagios and SNMP.
Can anyone guide me on what plugin/ check_SNMP command that would be used for this?

Any assistance would be much appreciated.
Thank you

[abrist]

You could check the snmp values for ifInErrors and ifOutErrors. Test with the following snmpget:

Code: Select all

snmpget -c <community> <ip> ifInErrors.1
snmpget -c <community> <ip> ifOutErrors.1

If it works, convert it to check_snmp.

[rhassing]

What type of switches (brand and type) are you using?
There are probably lots of snmp values which might be interesting.

Is it all copper, or also fiber connections?

Brgds,
Rob

[abrist]

Good follow up questions Rob.
OP: What type of errors are you interested in?

[jthomas]

Thank you for all the replies.

We are working with all Dell (and 1 HP) switches.
All switches are being monitored with SNMP and we have a full copper set up (other than the fiber coming in).
I got IfInErrors and ifOutErrors working and they are returning zero’s across the board but what exact errors are these monitoring?
Forgive me but this is my first real jump into the networking world and the only errors I know of are collisions and jabbers. After doing an SNMP walk and getting over 5000 returns I know that there are a lot of things in there that I can monitor but which would be best to monitor that would tell if the switch is going bad?

Also, all these commands work by monitoring 1 port at a time. Is there a way to monitor all ports at once? We have multiple switches with 48 ports, there has to be a way to set up a MIB for all ports with 1 command. Or is monitoring every odd or even numbered port industry standard practice?

[rhassing]

You could use a mibbrowser to get to know more about the available MIBS
http://ireasoning.com/mibbrowser.shtml

In this program you could load the IF-MIB.txt file and see what is available for the standard interfaces.

You could also use the following command to see what your switch is giving you:

Code: Select all

snmpwalk -v2c -c <communitystring> <ip address> | grep IF-MIB | more

With the mibbrowser you can read what the output means.

If you find the vendor specific MIBs you could even read more information from your switches.

[abrist]

See the follow faq about the standard ifInErrors/ifOutErrors:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/do ... html#snmp2