Monitoring of unused switchports

[donnie]

Hi all,

My environment is currently using cisco 3750 & 3850 for edge switches (end user switch) and are physically located in different LAN rooms within the building. I like to know how do you effectively monitor the number of unused switchports available so that i can proactively add switches to my existing edge switch stacks in the event the number of unused switchports is low. I am currently using solarwind to monitor my network equipment resources (cpu, mem) via snmp as well as the equipment up/down status. TIA!

[Reza Sharifi]

Hi,

SolarWinds does not give you that info. For that, there is a free software called "switchmap". You can download and install it. It will query your switches one or multiple times a day and gives you an inventory of what ports are used and what ports are not. In addition to this, it gives so much more info about your network (vlan, mac address, IP address, description, etc...). Here is a link to download it:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/switchmap/

HTH

[dbogdan]

I'm a little confused here. If the ports are unused, why aren't you turning them off? This way when someone needs a port, they request one. Then you keep a spreadsheet of what is used and not used. Makes diagnosis a lot easier, plus security will love you.