Switch port consumption report and capacity planning.

If SNMP is available on the switches then you can do many useful queries using SNMP.

But first you have to define what a "used" port is and an "unused port" is. It turns out to be a difficult question, once you start thinking about people turning off systems, people going on vacation, systems that are plugged in but unusued, systems that simply haven't had anything to say for awhile. The investigation gets noticably harder if you have some hubs or unmanaged switches. If your network staff doesn't already do the kind of tracking necessary for the above, chances are usually fairly high that someone has installed an unauthorized switch because ~$20 is a lot cheaper and faster than getting another authorized jack installed.

on the instance i do a 'show port status'

c> > >I have taken the task to do some capacity planning in our server and

brickwalls19 wrote:

That's fine and dandy if you want stats for that exact moment in time, say 09:00. But what about the group of call center people that don't come in until 13:00? There's another couple of dozen ports that may be disconnected when you check the status. Don't forget about the executive golf tournament, I mean business retreat that the upper crust happen to be gone to this week. There's another 4 dozen ports. Is there a bad case of flu going through the office? There's another large group of machines that are offline. The point is port status means very little if you aren't checking and logging the status of each individual port over a lengthy period of time. If you want to get anything accurate you should instead look at port statistics. Go through your interface statistics and look for ports that actually have carried Ethernet frames. Any ports that have been used since your last interface counter clearing will show that they've carried frames, even if the ports are currently offline. When you're done clear the counters. Do the same thing next week. Note any changes. This is as close as you can get to accurate port counts. Even this is not fool-proof. What about the extra ports in the conference room that are only used once a quarter to hookup all the misc AV equipment for the quarterly report, or the 3 dozen ports in the large storage room that gets cleaned out once a year and used for 3 weeks worth of training?

Thanks, you saved me a lot of typing along the same vein ;-)