@craiford@forestpharm.com
Charles,
Monitoring performance on for interfaces within the system can be done from a few places depending on what you're looking for. You can easily monitor FC ports for CRC, Signal errors, drops etc from the Statistics page when selecting a particular interface from the Equipment Tab. If you're looking to monitor more for performance you can leverage a Threshold Policy which will generate alerts when an interface reaches or exceeds a certain TX/RX value. You'll find a Threshold Policy available under the LAN and SAN tab for their respective interface types. If you want to view live performance data, you can drop into the NXOS CLI context and look at the input/output rate of any interface - virtual or physical.
Ex. (Keep in mind this is a lab system will no traffic flow currently)
cae-dev-A(nxos)# show int fc1/33 counters brief
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interface Input (rate is 1 min avg) Output (rate is 1 min avg)
--------------------------- -----------------------------
Rate Total Rate Total
MB/s Frames MB/s Frames
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
fc1/33 1499 1970665 2 5117759
cae-dev-A(nxos)# show int fc1/33 counters
fc1/33
1 minute input rate 256 bits/sec, 32 bytes/sec, 0 frames/sec
1 minute output rate 6936 bits/sec, 867 bytes/sec, 0 frames/sec
1970665 frames input, 2088440596 bytes
0 discards, 0 errors, 0 CRC
0 unknown class, 0 too long, 0 too short
5117759 frames output, 9468205792 bytes
0 discards, 0 errors
0 input OLS, 1 LRR, 0 NOS, 0 loop inits
2 output OLS, 2 LRR, 0 NOS, 0 loop inits
0 link failures, 0 sync losses, 0 signal losses
0 BB credit transitions from zero
16 receive B2B credit remaining
250 transmit B2B credit remaining
0 low priority transmit B2B credit remaining
cae-dev-A(nxos)#
The same could be done for ethernet, and port channel interfaces. The important aspect is to set yourself a baseline. Take some readings from your system under different circumstances. No load, regular load, and heavy load. This way you can compare your baselines to any reading you take and get an idea of how the system is functioning and whether or not you are saturating links.
When you want to look at different links within the system other than your vNIC & vHBA virtual interfaces or External interfaces we need to dive a little deeper into the sytem. Let's say we want to monitor the rate of traffic between an adaptor's DCE interface and the IOMs backplane. Depending on which IOM you have (2100 vs 2200 series) there are different commands for each. Why? - The IOM rate commands reference the ASIC name on the IOM. "Redwood" is the ASIC name for the 2100 Series IOM, and "Woodside" is for 2200 series.
To view these stats, we'll need to connect to the IOM directly. For the output below, I'm connecting from Fabric-A to the IOM in Chassis 1. The IOM is a 2204XP. For my system I'll be using the "woodside" command, but you can easily substitute the same command for "redwood" if you're using the 2104 IOM.
cae-dev-A# connect iom 1
Attaching to FEX 1 ...
To exit type 'exit', to abort type '$.'
fex-1# show platform software woodside rate+--------++------------+-----------+------------++------------+-----------+------------+-------+-------+---+
| Port || Tx Packets | Tx Rate | Tx Bit || Rx Packets | Rx Rate | Rx Bit |Avg Pkt|Avg Pkt| |
| || | (pkts/s) | Rate || | (pkts/s) | Rate | (Tx) | (Rx) |Err|
+--------++------------+-----------+------------++------------+-----------+------------+-------+-------+---+
| 0-BI || 22 | 4 | 4.00Kbps || 13 | 2 | 5.41Kbps | 94 | 240 | |
| 0-CI || 36 | 7 | 12.97Kbps || 52 | 10 | 62.63Kbps | 205 | 732 | |
| 0-NI3 || 73526 | 14705 | 11.76Mbps || 3796818 | 759363 | 9.36Gbps | 80 | 1521 | |
| 0-NI2 || 2 | 0 | 3.48Kbps || 5 | 1 | 2.60Kbps | 1072 | 305 | |
| 0-NI1 || 2 | 0 | 3.48Kbps || 39 | 7 | 8.96Kbps | 1072 | 123 | |
| 0-NI0 || 58 | 11 | 57.20Kbps || 9 | 1 | 3.29Kbps | 596 | 209 | |
| 0-HI3 || 3795538 | 759107 | 9.36Gbps || 0 | 0 | 0.00 bps | 1521 | 0 | |
| 0-HI1 || 1 | 0 | 480.00 bps || 73501 | 14700 | 11.76Mbps | 282 | 80 | |
+--------++------------+-----------+------------++------------+-----------+------------+-------+-------+---+
The main interfaces we're concerned with are the HI (Host Interface) and NI (Network Interfaces). The Host interfaces are the DCE interfaces connecting to the server's adapter. The Network Interface is the external interfaces on the back of the IOM, which connects up to the Fabric Interconnect. The two values colored green show a heavy traffic flow coming into the IOM on Network Interface 3, and exiting the IOM towards a server on Host Interface 3. (I was running iperf to generate some load).
As you can see, the NXOS context is very good for looking at live line rates of interfaces. You can see much of the interface rate information in the GUI using the stats views, but I personally prefer dropping into the CLI, and capturing outputs for the purpose of watching link performance. (Much easier to copy and paste into a spreadsheet for tracking also).
Hope this helps!
Robert
With Robert Burns
