Scrutinizer reports - Anyone know of a How-To?

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Hi all,

I am relatively new to networks and still trying to find my feet a bit as it were. A large part of my role is patching and capacity managmenet/planning.

We already have a spreadsheet that someone has created after auditing all of our various network devices and so on, which at present we update when any new patching is done and so forth. This is fine, however I know over time people will forget to update and/or make errors and this is going to become unreliable, which will then no doubt mean me going round doing a full audit again on all devices.

I want to try and avoid having to do that, so I am looking at a couple of the tools we have here, we have Cisco Works 3.1 LMS, Scrutinizer 6.0 and Denika, I am hoping that at least one of these tools could allow me to set up a way of reporting on interfaces, so I could have various reports set up to say poll certain devices (Core switches for example) and show any ports that have not been used for x amount of time, then I could do the same again on client patching switches and so on.

Problem is I don't know much about these tools or if this is even possible?

Anyone on here able to advise? Point me in the right direction? I would prefer to use Scrutinizer, as that is backed up by the best hardware. Our Cisco Works installation is ridiculously under powered and slow, and it's on a VM so to move it to decent hardware etc would probably mean needing to purchase something to do the job and that's unlikely in the current climate.

 

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For the unused ports, I still do that manually.

First, do show interfaces status | exclude connected

Then you'll get a nice list of interfaces that are currently not used.
Copy paste that file to notepad or something similar and inspect the interfaces one by one.

What you need is the last input/output counters:

example-switch-01#show interfaces fastEthernet 0/29 | include input
input flow-control is off, output flow-control is unsupported
Last input 24w0d, output 19:55:20, output hang never
5 minute input rate 0 bits/sec, 0 packets/sec
209117 packets input, 62496374 bytes, 0 no buffer
15 input errors, 0 CRC, 0 frame, 0 overrun, 0 ignored
0 watchdog, 1074 multicast, 0 pause input
0 input packets with dribble condition detected

If it hasn't been used for longer then 12weeks I just pull the cable
You do need to check the switch uptime with the show version command though...
If it has been restarted recently you could get a lot of calls after pulling cables

I'm sure there are automated ways/tools for doing this though, so I'm curious to know other people's methods too

 

Yeah I have been doing similar, I have been doing it manually and updating on this spreadsheet etc, just figure there must be a better way, more user friendly and quicker. Plus I know mistakes will be made by someone when using a spreadsheet. Inserting something in a wrong cell and so forth.

See if anyone else can make any useful suggestions that could help us both.

 

Just found this documentation for CiscoWorks v4:

Reports Management with CiscoWorks LAN Management Solution 4.0 - Chapter 3 Switch port reports  [Cisco Prime LAN Management Solution] - Cisco Systems

Does your v3 installation have something similar?

 

I've got the same document open ready to read, but haven't got round to reading it just yet. I am trying in the first to find something within Scrutinizer if I can, purely because our Cisco Works installation is really quite poor. I will investigate though and update this thread as I go.