How should I go about determining unused ports?

[yumfreek]

Greetings to everyone ,

Here is my predicament, I'm hoping someone can help point me in the best direction.

Knowledge Level of Cacti and rrdtool: Very basic, I installed it following the guide in Cacti 0.8 Beginner's Guide (http://www.amazon.com/Cacti-Beginners-G ... 1849513929)

Setting: A school with about 2k-3k machines. I have just set up Cacti 0.8.7i on CentOS 6 and it appears to be satisfactory in it's monitoring capabilities.

Goal: Monitor every port on every switch that is not being used and disable it. I do not want automatic shutdown, just a list of which ports are not being used. Say a port has an average of 0 kb over 2 weeks, then I know that it is not being used.

I decided to use the average amount of data being transferred over the port to determine if it was being used instead of up/down status. This is for future optimization purposes, as we will observe which ports are barely being used later on.

I know I can get this data by using the Interface - Traffic (bits/sec, Total Bandwidth) template for graphs, but I don't know how to pull out the total in/out numbers

Problem: I'm not really sure how to go about this, I've looked at two different ways.

1. Somehow get this directly from rrdtool using rrdtool fetch

2. Use the Reportit plugin to create the reports for me...I've researched and followed the documentation on it, and did manage to create a basic report. However, I still don't really understand what I'm doing with it or if it is even giving me what I want.

I'm thinking this is a fairly simple thing to do, but I fear my lack of intimate rrdtool knowledge is inhibiting progress...

Thank you for reading, and thanks for the excellent Cacti!

[yumfreek]

Ok I can't figure out how to use Reportit even after reading all the materials I could find...Still highly confusing.

All I want to do is know how to query each and every interface and get the total traffic transmitted for the past two weeks...

Any help? And yes, I've read the Cacti and rrdtool tutorials...

[noname]

I think if you followed step-by-step tutorials in ReportIt documentation pp.7-13,
you already got utilization report for the last month.

Then you can simply change its period to "Last 14 Days" in the report configuration (and run report again),
is it your goal?




// tested with reportit_v073 on Cacti 0.8.7g

[yumfreek]

Thanks for the help, but I don't think that Reportit is what I need in this situation. I don't need to create a report for 5700+ ports. I only want a report to be triggered when any interface has not sent anything in 2 weeks.

Now I'm just trying to figure out how to query the rrd's...I created graphs of Interface Traffic - Bytes with total for every port.

I think what I will do, if I can figure out how , is to script looking through every single rrd and see if any interface has a total of 0 sent over a period of 2 weeks and log it. However, I'm still having issues figuring out how to do that......Maybe I should go ask about rrdtool specifically...

[villieb]

Hi - did you ever manage to find a solution to this?