Announcing InMon Traffic Sentinel 8.2
June 2018: InMon Traffic Sentinel 8.2 is now available for download. This is a free upgrade for customers who have purchased annual maintenance.
Previous release: 8.1
New features include:
- New scalable, adaptive SNMP polling engine
- Support for AES 256-bit encryption in SNMPv3
- New discovery fields in switch-ports view
- All SNMP results accessible to javascript API
Unified adaptive SNMP polling engine
Although Traffic Sentinel uses sFlow streaming telemetry to collect counters efficiently from the network, it can also fall back on SNMP polling for devices that do not support sFlow. SNMP is also used for agent-discovery, topology discovery, VLAN discovery, host-location, address-mappings and more. With this release of Traffic Sentinel all SNMP polling is now handled with one new engine, which can be scaled smoothly to use multiple CPU cores if necessary. The engine runs continuously, but devices which respond slowly do not impact the polling of other devices. Separate MIB walks from the same device can also proceed independently, however interleaving is controlled so that each agent in the network is not asked to respond to multiple requests in parallel, and extra wait-time is inserted if the agent seems to be responding slowly.
The engine is scripted for maximum transparency and extensibility.
One process is usually enough for a network with several hundred switches but if necessary the global.prefs option POLLERS=4 will spread the load evenly over 4 CPU cores (inxpoll processes in the example below).
Support for AES 256-bit encryption in SNMPv3
To improve the security of SNMP transactions, you can now specify full AES 256-bit privacy encryption when using SNMPv3.
New discovery fields in switch-ports view
The LLDP protocol (and vendor-specific equivalents such as CDP) can provide insight not just into inter-switch links but also extra information about edge-connected hosts and VoIP phones. The Traffic>Status page now allows new columns to be added to the view so this information can be viewed alongside other interface properties.
All SNMP results accessible to javascript API
All results collected by the SNMP polling engine are stored under state/agents/<IPADDR>/ and are accessible to the javascript API via a new method in the Network class:
var n = Network.current();
n.path = "10.0.0.253";
var table = n.snmpTable("bridgeQ");
table.printFixed(true);