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Configuration Overview

The Traffic Sentinel configuration allows you to tell the server what to monitor, and how:

• How to divide up the network into a hierarchy of zones and groups to reflect your internal administrative domains.
• Where to find the switch and router agents, and talk to them with SNMP.
• What are the end-host subnets that make up the local IP address space on your network.
• What thresholds to apply, so that events are raised on excessive load conditions, or high error rates.
• What sampling rates to use for different link speeds (where sampling is configured automatically via SNMP).

The configuration is represented as an XML document on the server. You can choose to view and edit the XML directly, or you can use the graphical editor provided. In the Options pane you can select:

• Show Configuration to see a formatted representation of the current configuration.
• Edit Configuration to use the graphical editor to make changes.
• XML to download the XML configuration file, and upload it again after making your changes.

Configuration Hierarchy

The configuration is represented as a hierarchical tree-structure:

• enterprise
  • site
    • zone
      • group
        • agent-range
        • CIDR
        • agent
          • interface

Note: the term CIDR (Classless Inter-domain Routing) is used here to mean any IP subnet expressed in the form: address/mask-bits.

The enterprise and site levels are fixed, because one server is always responsible for just one site (even if this particular "site" spans several locations). The zone and group levels are abstract. There is no limit on how many can be defined, and they can be given any name. A common convention is to use zones to represent distinct locations, with groups being used to describe separate buildings or floors. It is also common to separate out the network core from the edge. A typical setup will divide the network into about ten zones. Within a zone, each groups can be a collection of CIDRs to descibe the end-host space, agents to identify individual switches or routers and agent-ranges to identify a range of addresses where switches or routers can be found. Specifying an interface is only ever needed if you want to override a setting just for that interface.

Note that this structure allows end-hosts and the devices that connect them to be logically grouped together, even if there is no overlap in the address space.

In addition to separating the address space and agents into a navigable tree, this structure also allows additional threshold, SNMP and sampling settings to be attached to the tree at any level. For example, a threshold setting applied to a zone will apply to all the interfaces that fall into that zone, unless the same threshold setting is overridden for a specific group, agent or interface.