SG200-50P Monitoring

[darryl66mason]

Hello,

We have been expereincing terrible LAN speeds thoughout our network and instead of complaining, it;s time to get off my butt and see what tools or functionality our SG200-50P can provide for us. It's very frustrating not knowing where the slowdown even resides whether one piece of hardware and I'm hoping the Cisco switch can provide us with some sort of troubleshooting utilities to try and help.

I do not pretend to be an expert on switches but I can learn and hoping someone can help get me going on what they recommend for someone who basically has a somewhat simple network where all the devices connect to a single switch, at this point my concern is LAN at the moment. Does this smart switch have the ability either through some sort of proprietory cisco software or functions within the GUI itself to see port utilization in determining bottle necking etc..

Thank you very much, I did download the manual.

[Tom Watts]

Hi Darryl, most of the diagnostics are within the switch under status and statistics.

For the interface, you can individually check what interfaces have the most traffic along with any packet errors.

For the etherlike, similar applies, for packet errors, etc

Health, you can check the fan status and temperature of the unit

You may also view the logs, the flash memory would contain any errors the switch encounters

Additionally, under the Admin -> Diagnositics you may check CPU utilization.

There is also a ping tool so you can verify some basic connectivity from the switches point of view.

I hope that may help you get in to a right direction.

-Tom
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[darryl66mason]

Wow Thomas, I was not expecting such a quick response, thank you. I'll remote in and have look at those areas you pointed out, thanks. I'm also reading about VLANS, sounds to me like within our facility and all the broadcasts it may something to explore further to our advantage.

I'll have to remap the ports and start viewing the stats on key ones. There isnt like a Cisco utility or anything that can graph or show all port activity at once.

Thanks once again, very appreciated.

[darryl66mason]

This is very interesting Thomas, after viewing port statistics on the majority of the ports, very few are not being used, the Packets of Errors are enormous, so I thought well how does compare to another facility. I remoted into the central facility into their SLM2048 switch and not a single packet of error on any of the active ports.

Hmmm, do you think the switch could be bad?

[Tom Watts]

Darryl, next thing to do is find out what kind of packets those are. If you go to Adminstration -> Diagnostics -> Port and VLAN Mirroring, you may set up a port monitor here. Then you can run wireshark to look at the traffic.

The Destination port is where you watch the traffic from (plug your computer here running wireshark). The Source Interface is where the traffic is coming from. Notice, if you enable the destination port, this port is effectively "inactive". The only thing you can do from there is run a packet capture. You will not be able to log in to the switch, access other devices, etc. So it is best to be on site for this practice just incase any thing bad happens... as specifying a wrong port can bring your network down.

Lastly, choose which direction TX = Transmit, RX = Receive.

-Tom
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[darryl66mason]

Funny you say that, I did play around with this 2 months ago, but the computer they had given me kept crashing cause it was just too little for Wireshark but at that time I was trying to see what traffic was commincating over the WAN and was using wireshark on conjunction with Riverbeds software.

I will see if the department will buy me an addtional PC to monitor our network cause I have nothing available to use as the analyzer. So tomorrow I need to map out all the ports to which PC's.

Thanks Thomas.