Link Health Monitoring for Switches Feature Overview and Configuration Guide

Link health monitoring is a feature that allows a network manager to continually monitor the health of their network. It does this by gathering health metrics comprising latency, jitter, and probe loss on an on-going basis. The health metrics can optionally be recorded in a history buffer for later review and analysis. Link health monitoring can also be used with the AlliedWare Plus Trigger facility to automatically change device configuration in response to changes in the health of a monitored link.

Link health monitoring on switches can be used to periodically monitor the health of a specific link or specific routing path over time by sending probes at a fixed interval. By recording the jitter and latency experienced by the probe, as well as the rate of probe loss, the health quality of the link can be determined.

Link health monitoring probes can be sent to fixed IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, or a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) can be specified as the destination which the device will attempt to resolve to an IP address. Link health monitoring can be configured to use either ICMP echo (ping) packets or HTTP GET requests, depending on the type of server the probe is being sent to.

The probe metrics can be recorded into a history buffer at multiple levels of granularity, allowing the network manager to collect performance data about their network that they can analyse to help diagnose network performance issues and outages. Triggers can be associated with link health monitoring probes and set to activate when a link is judged to be good, bad, unreachable, or upon any state change, allowing for device configuration to be dynamically modified in response to changing network conditions.