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1. After performing the initial setup and defining your Discovery settings, you must define your global switchport polling settings. Click the Settings icon > Setup > Collection and Groups > Global > Switchport Manager side tab to define your switch polling settings. Several primary polling options are offered:
   • Periodic Polling: Define regular polling time periods. Choose a polling interval of 1 or more Minutes or Hours. This is the default polling behavior for NetMRI. The default polling interval is 60 minutes.
   • Scheduled Polling: Schedule recurrent polling based on hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly time periods. Click Add New Schedule and select a Recurrence Pattern of Once, Hourly, Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. In all cases, you must choose an Execution Time.
   • On-demand polling: Click Poll Now to immediately begin polling all switch and switch-router devices in the managed network. For more information, see Understanding SPM Polling.
   • Completely disable switch port polling.
2. After defining global polling settings, you can define more specific polling settings at the Device Group level. For more information, see Device Actions in Switch Port Management.
   After some time, polled switch performance and configuration data appear in the NetMRI UI.
3. Go to Network Explorer > Switch Port Management.
   The left-side menu provides three categories: Devices, Interfaces, and End Hosts.
4. Click any menu item on the left for more information about the

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   switched devices in the network. For more information, see Using the Switch Port Management Console.
5. For port control, you can set any switched interface to administratively Up or administratively Down by right-clicking the switch interface link and selecting Set Admin Status. The NetMRI Sandbox with the built-in Port Activation Perl script is required for this operation. See " For more information, see Using the NetMRI Sandbox" in Job Scripting for more information.
6. You can also assign or change a VLAN assignment for a switch port by right-clicking the switch interface link and selecting Edit VLAN Membership.

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Two hierarchical lists appear on the Switch Port Management page, the Select Device Groups list on the right and the Devices, Interfaces, and End Hosts categories on the left. To begin using the Switch Port Management console, select any device group on the right-hand list. Each device group represents a data set from a selected group of network devices. Consider that some device groups (Routing, for example) have systems with ports that will not be managed or cataloged by Switch Port Management.

Image ModifiedAfter selecting a device group on the right, choose either Devices, Interfaces, or End Hosts on the left. Then choose a menu option from the exploded list. For example, Devices has five menu items.

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• Total Ports: The number of switched Ethernet ports, in the selected Device Group, that are being managed by Switch Port Management. If All Devices is chosen, this counter represents all managed switching ports.
• Free Ports: The count of ports most recently polled that show a link state of Down, having lost connectivity.
• Free Ports %: The percentage of all managed switch ports in the chosen Device Group showing Down link state.

• Available Ports: The count of ports that remained in a link state of Down for more than the prescribed time period. When a port is considered Available, it is deemed available for other network resources.

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  The number of Available ports will always be less than or equal to the number of Free ports. Trunk, routed, and unlicensed ports also are not included in the SPM port counts.

• Available Ports %: The percentage of all managed switch ports appearing as Available.

• PoE Ports: The count of Cisco switched Ethernet ports running the Power over Ethernet switching protocol for IP telephony applications.

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Network device polling is the key mechanism for building Switch Port Management (SPM)'s switching information, and the polling features provide considerable flexibility. You use polling at the Device Group level to check for changes to any active device in that group. You can define polling time periods for individual device groups so that administrators have near-real-time capabilities for

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NetMRI provides several polling and discovery optimizations under Advanced Settings. For more information, see Changing Advanced SPM Settings.

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Device Group Polling

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Infoblox recommends regular collection of interface performance statistics for Switch Port Management-managed systems, differing from the irregular or lengthy time periods used by the automatic collection of switch-forwarding data in the full NetMRI configuration. For information on switched interface management, see Managing Interfaces Through Switch Port Management.

Performance polling can be executed immediately, on demand, with limitations. If someone manually attempts to poll a device group when another poll of the entire network is already running, NetMRI notifies the user that another polling session is already in progress and will not execute the manual request until the current session completes.

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• View Device History: Choosing this option displays the Device Viewer in a separate browser window. The device window automatically displays the Device History, with the most recent History record at the top. In the Device History view, the First Seen time stamp is the first time the device's MAC address was discovered.
• The Last Seen timestamp represents the most recent time that NetMRI communicated with the device (often the most recent polling event). The device Name is the configured name of the switching device. The device's IP address is also shown, along with the DNS Name if any. A standard Description (taken directly from the device) is given along with the Poll Duration. If the Poll Duration shows a value of "1" the polling process completed in the normal time period.

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  SPM tracks MAC addresses and their associated IP and switch port history. SPM separately maintains an active record of all MACs ever seen by the NetMRI system, along with their associated connectivity information.

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• Unique identities for all detected End Hosts are established by their respective MAC addresses.
  
• Open Telnet Session: Uses the Telnet/SSH proxy built-in to NetMRI to start a Telnet session with the selected device.
• Open SSH Session: Uses the Telnet/SSH proxy built-in to NetMRI to start an SSH session with the selected device.
• Topology Viewer: Through a second-level dropdown menu, gives quick access to Layer 2 and Layer 3 views of the network topology surrounding the chosen device. If the selected device is classified as a Switch, only the L2nHop and L2/L3PathViewer topology views are available.
  • L2 nHop: Shows the devices that can be reached from a starting device through a given number of Level 2 (actually a hybrid of L1 and L2) connections.
  • L3 nHop: Shows devices that can be reached from a starting device through a given number of routed Level 3 connections.
  • L3 Path Viewer: Shows the most likely path traffic would take, ignoring Layer 2 connectivity and concentrating on L3 reachability and the "best" path for communication between Layer 3 devices.
  • L2/L3 Path Viewer: Shows the most likely path traffic would take between two devices, including both Layer 2 and Layer 3 connectivity.

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• Set Admin Status: Set the port to administratively Up or administratively Down. The NetMRI Sandbox with the built-in Port Activation Perl script is required for this operation. See " For more information, see Using the NetMRI Sandbox" in Job Scripting for more information. 
• Edit Description: A text label describing the port in the If Description column.
• Edit VLAN Membership: This allows you to assign data and voice VLANs to an interface in order to separate data and voice traffic. You can assign VLANs of one type or both types, or disable any VLAN assignments.

To assign a VLAN, select the VLAN ID and name, and click Save. The assigned VLANs are added to the table. To disable existing VLAN assignments, select No Data VLAN or No Voice VLAN, and click Save. All VLANs of the corresponding type are removed from the table.

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