[ewg] How to monitor traffic with IBoE/RoCEE?

[Pradeep Satyanarayana]

Tom Ammon wrote:
> A widely-supported method for collecting statistics from ethernet
> switching devices is SNMP. As Woody said, you wouldn't manage your
> ethernet network any differently than you do now. In addition many many
> tools have been written to make use of SNMP counters, so you won't have
> a hard time finding tools, both commercial and open source.
> 
> Tom
> 
> On 03/26/2010 11:29 AM, Woodruff, Robert J wrote:
>> Pradeep wrote,
>>
>>   
>>> With IBoE/RoCEE, the traditional SM in IB clusters is not needed.
>>> Most of the current
>>> IB tools rely on the SM and PM to get packet and error statistics and
>>> so on. These
>>> won't be applicable with IBoE/RoCEE. netstat will have no value since
>>> the kernel
>>> has been bypassed. So, how does one monitor traffic in such a cluster?
>>>      
>> Some managed Ethernet switches have the ability to log into them and
>> get information
>> on packets transmited/received on each port and errors that are
>> detected. However,
>> these are typically proprietary. I am not sure about the Mellanox card.
>>
>> So I guess the answer is that you manage RoCCE and iWarp clusters just
>> like
>> you would any Ethernet cluster, with existing management tools that
>> are available
>> for managing Ethernet.
>>
>> woody

True, I suspected that would be the case. However, that means we are using
a different management model than with IB clusters. Hence, I was curious if
Mellanox had any tools to get say some hardware counters without going to a
different management model.

Thanks
Pradeep