HP Switch Monitoring Software

[Gongalong]

Hi folks,

Is anyone familiar with and have a view on the HP Switch monitoring software, and have an idea of cost?

My understanding is that it is bundled with the higher-up-the-range switches, but can be bought.

TIA

[maark]

Procurve manager is excellent - not that cheap - but if you have a lot of HP switches really helps.
You can see firmware and upgrade switches as well as looking at topology of network.
Most useful feature - search for mac address and it will tell you what port and switch it is connected to.
It needs a fairly high spec machine to run on with at least 4GB of ram - I use an old server.

[Millgate]

Procurve manager is excellent - not that cheap - but if you have a lot of HP switches really helps.
You can see firmware and upgrade switches as well as looking at topology of network.
Most useful feature - search for mac address and it will tell you what port and switch it is connected to.
It needs a fairly high spec machine to run on with at least 4GB of ram - I use an old server.

You're right in saying it's not cheap but it is worth it if you're a HP house.

[IanT]

HP ProCurve Manager is an excellent product! but does cost a bit!

[morganw]

Can you see live bandwidth values or is it nothing more than a fancy interface on top of SNMP polling?

[m25man]

To get realtime traffic monitoring you really need to be able to read and interpret Netflow/S-Flow/J-Flow streams.
Netflow is a Cisco feature, J-Flow Juniper and the better HP switches support the S/Flow standard.
Not all HP switches support SFlow and the best you can expect from the lower end is SNMP data.
The later Netgear stuff supports S-Flow.
Procurve Manager uses all available methods and enables SFlow on compatible HP devices and SNMP on the rest.

You might want to try something like this Free Real-Time NetFlow Analyzer from SolarWinds or one of the Quest Products Like NMS or even the Managengine Products Bandwidth Monitoring | Bandwidth Reporting | Bandwidth Meter :: NetFlow Analyzer

It all depends on what your trying to get a handle on.

Sorry Quest link missed, http://www.quest.com/ecard/33758/15339/

[localzuk]

I would recommend Cacti - does the job perfectly well for us.

[synaesthesia]

Procurve manager on its own (free, I hasten to add) seems just fine for our needs. We do have a cacti server but the procurve interface (well, not sure what it's called now as Procurve is soon to be history) is that little bit better for getting to the nitty gritty that little bit quicker. Its PCM plus that costs.

[Gongalong]

Ah-ha! Well hopefully the basic PCM is the ticket. Thanks, very helpful!

[Gongalong]

Anyone know with PCM whether it's possible to show a list of devices by utilisation, rather than device ports by utilisation? Just for a simple summary view.