SNMP management of Ten Giga ports

Using SNMP is the ideal way for managing network performance and traffic. There are also some great tools on the net that will help to do it easily like Lan-Secure Switch Center multi vendor switch port scanner network monitoring software. Either doing it manually or using any preferred tool the exact port speed will be required for having accurate performance and traffic results.

SNMP standard port or interface speed
The standard SNMP port or interface speed can be resolved by using the MIB-II interface speed query (1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.5). Using this query with SNMP Get command and the interface index will return the speed of the specific interface. Using this query with SNMP Get Next command will return the speed of all the interfaces that exist on the device that was queried. The value that will be returned from the query will be the interface bandwidth in bits per second units.

SNMP speed of Ten Giga port or interface
Trying to use the standard SNMP interface speed query on Ten Giga port will return a value of 4294967295 bits per second. This value is the maximum speed that the standard SNMP query will hold for any device interface and it is about 4.3G bits per second. Using this speed to manage the performance and traffic of a Ten Giga ports will return false and inaccurate results.

SNMP high speed port or interface
A solution for the Ten Giga ports speed problem that was described above will require using the MIB-II interface high speed query (1.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.15). Using this query will return the interface bandwidth in 1,000,000 bits per second units. Replacing the standard speed query with the high speed interface query will work for almost all SNMP devices that support Ten Giga ports and provide an accurate performance and traffic results.