Switches
Overview
If your switches are recognised by Highlight, you can enable LAN switch monitoring to get a fast, detailed picture of how they are performing - traffic levels, health issues, and outages on every port, presented in a simple clear format. You can designate specific ports as 'critical' (for example, server connections) and Highlight will alert if these ports have problems.
Collecting Data
Highlight collects two types of data from the switch:
- At every poll on every port (typically every 5 minutes)
Stability - State changes
Highlight detects any state change, essentially checking if a port is down
Load - Traffic levels
In and out, calculated as a percentage of port speed with 80% as the threshold value
Health - Error frequency
Reported as errors per 1000 packets. What constitutes an error varies by vendor but usually is a mix of low-level errors (framing, duplex, bad-sized packets etc.) and Layer 2 errors (CRC checks). For more information consult the individual vendor documentation. Errors are normally caused by faulty cabling or a faulty switch port.
- Once an hour on every port
Highlight collects the following every hour to update basic data on the switch:
Port Name: as configured on the switch as the description
Port State: up or down and the length of time it has been up or down
Port Speed: normally 10M / 100M / 1G bps
This information is used on the Technical Details page and pop-up, see section below.
Port Summary
The upper part of the Details page shows a summary of every port on the switch. For all time periods (day, week or month) the summary shows:
any issues as stability, load or health
the severity or frequency of any issues
Today: Live Status
When Today is selected a live status is shown as a coloured square behind the port number. This status is obtained by the poller every 5 minutes. The colours mean:
Green: the port is live
Amber: the live status is unavailable due to issues obtaining details; all ports will show as amber
Red: critical port is down, red is only used for critical ports
Grey: non-critical port is down, idle or unused, grey is only used for non-critical ports
White circle: indicates a port that was idle, unused or down throughout the selected time period - a useful way to spot āfreeā ports on a switch
Green circle: indicates an active port; the marker will remain green for each metric (stability, load, health) unless certain conditions occur, further details below
Stability:
Amber circle: For each poll within the selected time period, Highlight detects any state change, essentially checking if a port is down.
Red circle: indicates port was down for at least one sample in the time periodindicates port was down for 10% or more of samples in the period
Load:
Amber circle: For each poll within the selected time period, Highlight detects load greater than the threshold value and then counts how many instances of excessive load occur. The threshold is 80%.
Red circle: indicates port load was > threshold on 5% - 50% of the samples in the time periodindicates port load was > threshold on 50% or more of the samples in the time period
Health:
Amber circle: For each poll within the selected time period, Highlight detects any errors.
Red circle: indicates port error rate was >0 for 0.5% - 5% of the samples in the time periodindicates port error rate was >0 for 5% or more of the samples in the time period
Special case
If all samples for a port return Port down for the period requested, then Stability, Load and Health all display as white
Alias or interface name
Hovering over an individual port will show a tooltip with that portās alias or interface name, if one has been configured on the switch; otherwise the tooltip will show the interface name. If neither the alias nor the interface is available, the port number is shown.
Critical ports
Clicking on an individual critical port will scroll to and expand a chart for that port for the selected time period. Each chart is labelled with the slot and port number,and alias or interface name, if available.
Port Summary Filter on All/Active/Critical
All: This is the default option. All ports are shown.
Active: This includes active and critical ports. Active means the port had data within the selected time period (day, week or month).
Critical: Only ports which have been designated as critical are shown.
Technical Details
Clicking the Tech info on the Details page shows the information Highlight has on this switch. As outlined in the collecting data from the switch section above, Highlight collects this information on an hourly basis to reduce management traffic overhead. The date / time of the last collection for this switch is shown in the header (Last Checked).
Port information
For switches, a summary for each slot is shown with the total number of ports and how many are idle and unused. Then each port on the device is listed with the following information:
Critical: whether this port is marked as critical in Highlight, meaning it will affect heat tiles and generate alerts
Slot: a number
Port: a number
Interface: the name used on the device to reference that port
Alias: the description configured on the interface, if any
Speed: the current speed of this port; some switches return āUnknownā if the port is not in use
State: state of the port and the length of time it has been in this state. The description of port states are as follows:
Up: port is active
Down: changed state from Up in the last 48 hours
Unused: most recent state changed within 10 minutes of system power up
Idle: a previously used port that has been inactive for over 48 hours
Critical Ports
For the switch, this panel shows a chart for each critical port designated in Highlight. Only critical ports can change the colour of a heat tile and generate an alert email or webhook. Charts are labelled with the slot and port number and that portās alias or interface name, if one has been configured on the switch. Critical ports are also indicated by a blue background marker in the Port Summary panel.
A port that is disabled behaves the same as if the port is down (red blips etc.)
Stability
Stability blip line is shown as a grey line if unavailable or a thicker green line if up. Hover on the chart to see timestamp and precise values.
Stability
No data
Receiving data
Port down
Load
Load has two blip lines for in and out. A grey line is shown if unavailable or a thicker green line up to 50%. Hover on the chart to see timestamp and precise values. Above 50% it's shown in coloured blips:
Load
No data
0% to 50%
51% to 65%
66% to 80%
81% to 95%
96% to 100%
Health
Health blip line shows coloured blips according to the severity of the line drops and errors detected on the port. Hover on the chart to see timestamp and precise values. Coloured blips indicate approximate values:
Health
No data
0
1
2 - 11
12 - 23
24 - 52
53 - 74
75 - 100
Related information
See next section for how critical ports affect heat tiles and generate alerts.
How critical ports affect heat tiles and generate alerts
Sensitivity settings
Thresholds
The tables below show how each metric changes a heat tile and generates an alert (if one has been set up) based on the sensitivity settings in the previous image.
Table below shows turning from green to amber and eventually red:
Stability
Port is down
2
2 more; 4 in total
Load
>60%
5
5 more; 10 in total
Health
Errors per 1000 frames rate >1;
10
10 more; 20 in total
Table below shows returning back from red to amber and eventually green:
Stability
Port is up
3
3 more; 6 in total
Load
ā¤60%
6
6 more; 12 in total
Health
Errors per 1000 frames rate ā¤1
12
12 more; 24 in total
Supported Manufacturers
Last updated
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