Netflow or Sflow

[George Bradlink]

We have 15 or 20 WISP Switches. They vary from 8-24 ports.

Do Netonix switches support or send flow packets to a collector or are there steps to do that? Netflow, Sflow, etc?

Thanks,

George

[Stephen]

Unfortunately, the manufacturer of our switch core has not built Netflow, sFlow, or IPFIX into the hardware so it is not accessible for us to add this in. The only monitoring method available is SNMP.

[George Bradlink]

Thank you Stephen. Would be a nice feature to support. I'll try to work with SNMP.

George

[Stephen]

You're welcome George, wish I had better news for you.
I don't believe it's impossible to emulate this functionality in software so I will look into it.

But while the WS line's switch core easily does line speed because it's hardware switched. Emulating a complex protocol in software is more difficult because the CPU that talks to the ASIC switch core is like a tug boat directing a cruise liner. Most likely it will have to be done on the newer WS3 line coming out that has much beefier hardware.

[George Bradlink]

Thank you again Stephen. We're trying to incorporate network mapping/flow monitoring/status monitoring into our network for visual-real-time observations and our current software, Scrutinizer, uses Netflow to do this. We may be able to get it to query the devices using SNMP but I'm not sure.

Currently, it is cumbersome to try to get a *look* at our network's status and its various traffic levels.

Thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks again,

George

[Stephen]

Well, I don't think you can do flow monitoring with SNMP. But you can certainly do network mapping and status monitoring with it. So if you're interested in just identifying issue's in your network like congestion or failing devices then SNMP should do the job.

I'm not familiar with Scrutinizer specifically. But we have a post that show's how to import our MIB file's for OID's specific to Netonix Switches into PRTG and I imagine the process for your tool should be similar:
Setting up PRTG to use SNMP with Netonix

If you truly need the flow information (as in maybe you want to monitor session's from user's for specific bandwidth usage's for billing). Then probably the easiest way to do that right now would be to install a router that supports Netflow between the switches and your provider and have it export to the collector/Scrutinzer. I would imagine that 99% of relevant traffic would pass through there anyway since even if users are talking to each other they are probably using a cloud service of some sort. My guess is even a very low sampling rate would yield useful information in that case.

Those are my thoughts, I'm sure there are other user's here who could offer further insight.

[Stephen]

Oh, and if you're not using it already take a look at the Netonix Manager. It can automatically find Netonix switches on a local network and give you a basic readout of the device status (including bandwidth, firmware version, power, etc) and give you an easier interface to update groups of switches on a schedule among other options.