Cisco 4510 Performance Monitoring

[ryanparr9]

How would you determine if your Cisco 4510 running IOS is having perfomance issues? The slots are 6Gb and I am wondering if my 48 port Gb blades are hitting this limitation. I use Solarwinds Orion NPM and monitor the switch via SNMP. I can get individual port usage information but it's difficult to determine if the slot speed is limiting this switch.

How do I determine if I need to upgrade my switch?

Thanks!

[Giuseppe Larosa]

Hello Ryan,

if you mean 4548 linecards or older be aware of the following fact:

the 6GBps to and from backplane is actually divided in 6 8 ports group.

Each 8 ports group is managed by a single ASIC chip and can handle 1Gbps per direction.

from the command line we could see the performance issues during tests on new nas servers.

You can see a lot of fast increasing output drops on ports of the same 8-ports group.

So the suggestion is to look for the SNMP MIB counter for output drops for each interface.

you can use snmp object navigator

1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.19

ifOutDiscards

ifOutErrors

1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.20

about upgrade:

if you many servers with high usage it can be a problem with these linecards

Hope to help

Giuseppe

[ryanparr9]

Very good info! Yes, 4548, 4448, and 4148 cards.

Using Orion I was able to pull all the info for all the ports. I am not sure how old the data is in the switch but I have a number of discards. Not as many errors though.

How do I clear this data or reset it? One reason I ask is that we had what I think was a broadcast storm recently and I haven't been able to narrow down where the issue was. This info might help me when we have the issue again.

Now... what is an acceptable or normal level of discards/errors? Should there be any at all? Would a new switch with non-blocking ports have these disacards?

ifDescr ifOutDiscards

GigabitEthernet7/11 109720022

GigabitEthernet7/16 109375956

GigabitEthernet9/17 22504409

GigabitEthernet9/26 22447137

GigabitEthernet8/8 17037786

GigabitEthernet8/38 7479270

GigabitEthernet9/14 7040013

GigabitEthernet9/16 7000380

GigabitEthernet7/24 5062349

GigabitEthernet6/47 3283903

GigabitEthernet8/2 2946203

GigabitEthernet4/20 2824037

GigabitEthernet8/4 2588855

GigabitEthernet7/35 1979764

GigabitEthernet7/47 1945553

Thanks for the help!