[nv-l] Switch management and port status monitoring

I am trying to wrap up the survey to feed the compiled information to our development team by Friday of this week. We've received valuable information from those who have already responded, but I would like to gather as many responses as possible before turning it in.

If you have the time, please respond to the survey, either to the list, or directly to my email. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes to complete.

Thank you.

Jim Markham
Tivoli Systems
IBM Software Group
Email: markhaja AT us.ibm DOT com
T/L 687-1405, (919)224-1405

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We have put together a short survey of questions regarding switch management/layer 2 support to better understand how customers might use port status monitoring. Participation is voluntary. Your responses will be very helpful in determining future design direction.

How many switches do you have in your network environment?
If you could, how many switches would you like to monitor?
If you could do port status monitoring on your switches, How would you like to specify the switches to monitor? For example, by hostname, IP address, OID, wildcards, others?

If you could prioritize a particular mechanism for specifying switches,

What method would be the most important to you?
What method would be the least important?
Are there particular combinations that are most important in your environment?
Briefly describe the approach you would use to select the switches you would like to monitor. For example, would you monitor all switches and exclude those that don't require monitoring, or would you be very selective at including specific switches?
What types of ports would you want to monitor on a switch? For example:

All ports
Trunk ports
Ports connected to another switch or router
Ports assigned to specific VLANs
Combinations of the above. What combinations are most important to you?
Would you monitor for different information if it was a core vs. access switch, or core vs. cascaded? If so, what would be the different things you would want to monitor?
What other type of information is important to monitor about a switch?
How do you work with VLANs today?

What type of information would you like to see regarding VLANs?
Would you want to monitor different information for a switch if you were monitoring it for one of your customers, rather than a switch within your own company's infrastructure? If so, what would you do differently?
What tools do you currently use to monitor your switches? What valuable information do they provide?
How do you currently diagnose problems with your switches? What tool helps the most, and how does it help?