1. Introduction

Table of Contents

1.1. Introducing sFlowTrend-Pro
1.2. About sFlow
1.3. Getting started
1.4. Navigating around sFlowTrend-Pro using browser history and bookmarks
1.5. Getting help

1.1. Introducing sFlowTrend-Pro

sFlowTrend-Pro is a Java application, which monitors sFlow® enabled network switches, routers and hosts. It is designed to be easy to install and use, and to allow network and host problems to be understood and resolved quickly. Summaries and detail of network traffic can be displayed for the whole network, on a per-switch or per-interface level, thresholds used to provide alerts to abnormal traffic conditions, and historical traffic patterns reviewed to determine when changes occurred. Host performance metrics can be monitored for an entire data centre.

As its name implies, sFlowTrend-Pro only monitors sFlow enabled switches, routers and hosts. For the sake of clarity, in the remainder of this documentation network devices will be referred to as switches; if there is an instance where a router has different behavior or requirements, this will be highlighted.

sFlowTrend is a limited functionality version of sFlowTrend-Pro. Throughout this documentation, sFlowTrend-Pro will be used to refer to sFlowTrend and sFlowTrend-Pro. Features that only apply to sFlowTrend-Pro will be highlighted with .

sFlowTrend-Pro runs as a client/server application. The sFlowTrend-Pro server runs as a service, continuously in the background, collecting data even when no-one is logged in. A client is used to run the GUI, and view the data from the server. It connects to the server over HTTP or HTTPS using a RESTful API (see Section 15.4, “sFlowTrend-Pro REST API”). Any modern web browser which supports HTML5 can be used to access the GUI (web client). The web client can be run on the same system as the server, or a different one, and multiple web clients can connect to the same server at once.

The sFlowTrend-Pro service is installed via a traditional installer. The installation starts the service. After each reboot, the service is started automatically and data collection will resume. The installation also includes a web server which allows you to run the web client GUI from a web browser pointed at http://[hostname]:8087/sflowtrend (or over https https://[hostname]:8443/sflowtrend). See Section 2.2, “Connecting to sFlowTrend-Pro”.

sFlowTrend-Pro has an optional user authentication feature (see Section 13.4, “Configuring user authentication ). If enabled, only users who are authenticated with a password can access the system and view data. Additionally, some functionality, for example adding new switches to monitor, is only available to administrators. If a particular part of sFlowTrend-Pro can only be used by an administrator, this is highlighted with in this documentation. Note that if user authentication is not in use, then this does not apply and everyone can access all of the features.

sFlowTrend-Pro follows a familiar layout of many applications.

Menu
The menu provides access to configuration tools and other utility functions. A description of the menu items is given in Section 16.1, “Menu reference”.
Help
Clicking on the help icon takes you to the on-line help.
Tab bar
Clicking on a tab will take you to the view associated with that tab. Some parts of sFlowTrend-Pro are equipped with hotlinks, which take you to a different view or tab when clicked (the mouse cursor will change to a hand when this is possible).
Status bar
Along the bottom edge of the window is a status bar, which shows the overall status of the switches and hosts being monitoring, or the status of the currently selected switch if the Network or Threshold tabs are being viewed.
Progress indicator
The progress indicator indicates when the charts and tables will be updated with the most recent traffic and host data. The outer ring in the progress indicator shows the progress through the current minute. The centre of the progress indicator indicates when the chart or table will next be updated. If the chart or table is not being updated automatically, the centre will be shown as a filled circle.