porttracker Technical Information

Platform

• Dedicated Physical Hardware Platform
• 64-bit Virtual Appliance (VMware)

Physical Appliance benefits

• Guaranteed performance
• 1U Rack mountable
• 64-bit Architecture

Virtual Appliance Benefits

• Increase hardware utilization and reduce hardware costs
• Datacenter space saving
• Reduced power and cooling requirements
• Reduced system recovery time in the event of failure
• Can potentially scale beyond limits of a single physical appliance
• 64-bit distribution
• More cost efficient per port

Discovery

• Finds CDP and LLDP enabled infrastructure devices (Switches/Routers)
• Manually seed infrastructure devices
• Flexible SNMP community credentials
• Discovery Realms allow you to limit and separate data

Polling

• Freshens data using pings with bandwidth throttle (optional)
• Distributed pollers
• Valuable Information about Infrastructure devices
  • *NEW* Description
  • *NEW* Location
  • *NEW* Poll Duration
  • *NEW* Layers
  • First/Last Seen
  • Comments
• Valuable Information about End Devices and Ports
  • Speed and Duplex
  • VLAN number and description
  • VTP Domain
  • *NEW* Packets
  • *NEW* Errors
  • First/Last Seen

Scheduling

• Individually selectable schedules
• Discovery
• Poll
• Sync
• Reporting
• Backup
• Hourly, Daily, Weekly, an now *NEW* Monthly Options
• *NEW* Email Notifications upon completion

Views and Reports

• Selectable Columns
• Customizable multi-column Filters
• 2-column Sorting
• Saved Views
• *NEW* Personalized "Default" Views
• Scheduled reports in HTML/CSV format via email
• Complete Audit history of a switch, port, and end device
• *NEW* telnet to infrastructure device interface
• *NEW* Summary view showing the number of Infrastructure, Ports, and End Devices found during the last operations.
• *NEW* Totals for Current Views

Porttracker can displays the following collected and derived fields:

End Devices view

End Devices view displays end device connectivity information including:

• DNS Name (FQDN)
• IP Address
• MAC Address
• Switch Name
• Switch IP
• Slot/Port
• Admin/Link Status
• Speed/Duplex
• VLAN Number and Name
• Port Alias and Description
• VTP info
• First/Last Seen Times
• Comments

Infrastructure View

Infrastructure view displays information about the switch and port capacity information including:

• Switch Name, IP Address, and FQDN
• Total, Free Ports (not in use 'now'), and Available Ports (not used for a period of time)
• First Seen, Last Seen, and Last Changed times
• *NEW* Description, Location, and Services

Port View

Port view displays interface information as well as device type for all physical connections on the switch, including:

• Switch name and IP
• Last seen time for the switch
• Slot/Port number
• Speed/Duplex
• Port MAC
• Admin/Link Status
• Last Changed time
• Port Alias and Description
• Detected Device Type and count (End device, Phone, Infrastructure, Nothing Found)
• *NEW* Packets and Errors

Filters

Filters are used to mine the potentially large amount of data in the porttracker database and show with precision the desired information. Multiple filters can be applied between fields and within fields to display exactly what is required.

Filters include:

• AND, OR, NOT
• GREATER THAN, LESS THAN
• BEFORE, AFTER, Relative Dates (e.g. in the last 'n' weeks)
• Network/Mask, *.*

One or two columns can also be sorted in Ascending or Descending order.

Saved Views and Reports

Filters, column selection, rows per page and sort order can all be customized and saved for later use.

A user can choose their own "default" view.

These saved views can also be turned into reports, and emailed in either CSV or HTML on a scheduled basis.

Settings and Configuration

• SNMP throttling - timeouts, retries, and parallel requests
• Email configurations - Mail server and authentication
• Cisco VoIP Phones - Show as Infrastructure or End Devices
• Poller Assignments - Automatically assign Infrastructure to relevant distributed poller
• Max History Length - Limit the number of days history is kept

Importing/Exporting

• Export to CSCV automatically or on demand
• JSON API - programming language independent (C, Perl, PHP, etc)

Infrastructure Suppliers

porttracker compatibility has been validated for the additional switch vendors in v2.2; HP Procurve, 3Com, Cisco, Extreme Networks, Force 10, Alcatel 9Alcatel Omnistack 6124 & 6200) Foundry, Allied Telesis, Huawei, and Nortel (Baystack & Passport 8610).

Using various discovery mechanisms, porttracker will be able to assign these switches to pollers and report on end-device connectivity.