Table of Contents
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.