High and Low watermarks for port utilization

Overview

This helps in monitoring and analyzing bandwidth usage and route traffic patterns, allowing you to capture burst conditions by tracking high and low water marks.

Note

This feature is applicable only for Ethernet ports.

This features uses the snapshot of the ethernet port statistics maintained in the management module (MM). The statistics is updated periodically. This data is used to update the high and low water mark values. When the system is up, all the watermark values are set to zero by default.

Recording high and low water marks

This feature reads the ethernet port statistics in every 6 seconds and collects the ingress and egress MBPS and PPS. If the collected value is greater than the existing high watermark value, the high watermark value is updated with the collected value. If the value is non-zero and lower than the existing low watermark value, the low watermark value is updated with the collected value. If the value is zero, then it is ignored.

The watermark values recorded are maintained in two ways; the last 2 hours and the last two days.

• The last two hours data is maintained in two windows – the current one hour and the last one hour. When the current one hour expires, the last one hour data is updated with the recently expired current one hour data and a new current one hour window is opened.
• The last 2 days data is maintained in two windows – The current 24 hours and the last 24 hours. When the current 24 hours expire, the last 24 hours data is updated with the recently expired current 24 hours data and a new current 24 hours window is opened.
  

  Note

  The current 1 hour and 24 hour windows start when the MM is up.

Resetting watermark values

The watermark values are reset on chassis reboot. If a card goes down, the values for that card is maintained just the in the way it is handled when the card is up. Whenever a new card is up, watermark feature checks if the new card type is different from the old card that was occupying the slot. If yes, the data for that particular slot is reset.

Enabling and disabling High and Low watermarks

You can enable the high and low watermark feature using the system interface utilization-watermark command. The command is run form the configuration mode.

device(config)# system interface utilization-watermark

The no form of the command disables the feature. For more details about the command, please refer the SLX-OS Command Reference guide.

Note

By default, this feature is enabled globally.

When the feature is disabled, the watermark values already recorded persist. When the feature is enabled again, all the watermark values are reset to default. The show and clear commands to display and clear watermark values are available even when the feature is disabled. When you disable the feature, the configuration shall be saved and restored on reset.