Prime 3.8 how to monitor MAC addresses from trunk ports

[Ditter]

Hi to all,

supposing that we have a third party switch that is configured with 802.1q trunk with a cisco 4500 switch which is added in inventory with SNMP as well as through SSH credentials. 

Shouldn't i be able to monitor clients that are present in the third party switch?

I do not mean to know the exact port of the third party switch but at least the trunk port through which this MAC is coming in the network?

From the Clients and Users tab in the PI 3.8 no user through the trunk port is present although Prime has understood that this is a trunk port.

Thanks

Ditter.

[Ditter]

I suppose that from Monitor / Monitoring Tools / Clients and Users i can only see wired  clients that are "attached" as access ports to cisco switches.  So from where i can get info about MAC addresses that are in trunk ports and not present in access ports?

[marce1000]

 - I would say that any mac address containing to a connected physical device is on an access port. Trunk ports create traffic from different vlan's and a single vlan contains traffic from particular source and destionation mac addresses. So  I feel that 'mac addresses in trunk ports' is a concept that is not really valid , let alone that all trunk ports in a vtp domain would not see the same source or destination mac address passing  by (for instance)

 M.

[Ditter]

Thanks for your reply.

The thing is that are cases when a customer needs to know what MAC addresses are coming from a non-cisco switch that is trunked through 820.1q with a cisco switch.  Even if SNMP RO is enabled in the third party switch there are cases where these MAC from the third party switch do not appear in Cisco PRIME (At least me i do not know where to search for them).  Please note that i simply want to know from what switch these MACs stem from, not necessarily to know what physical port they are attached to.

Is it possoble to get this info from prime?

Thanks again,

Ditter.

[marce1000]

 - The problem vanishes in an all-Cisco environment, other benefits include, consistent network monitoring , detecting link failures, streamlined  switch management and upgrade procedures, and much more.

 M.

[Ditter]

Yes that is true, but unfortunately this is not always viable.  There are cases especially in large enterprises where some third party switches still exist and it is not always easy to replace them with cisco switches.

Thanks for your reply,

Ditter.

[Sergio Jose]

Hi,

If you know the mac address, can you use the mac address in the "Application serach" on the top of the Alarms and Events page to see if it returns any result?

[Ditter]

Thanks Sergio,

no luck from that menu either.

Prime most probably won't report MACs location coming from trunk ports out of third party switches.