How are MAC addresses displayed in Spectrum OneClick?

Products

• CA Spectrum
• DX NetOps

Issue/Introduction

There are different ways through which we can monitor the mac-address depending on the requirement.

 

Environment

DX NetOps Spectrum 20.2 or later

Resolution

Mac addresses for an interface can be displayed by enabling the MAC Address column in the interfaces tab:

Mac Addresses that are learned from the dot1dBridgeTable, can be displayed in the Transparent Table -> Forwarding Table subview.

However, this information is being displayed per VLAN, because that is how it is stored in the table. Additionally, the port column displays the bridge port not the ifIndex. The bridge port may or may not be the same as the ifIndex. The dot1dBasePortTable contains a mapping of the bridge port to the ifIndex.

Nowhere in Spectrum do we display the entire Forwarding Table. There are a number of reasons why we do not do this:

1. As discussed previously, the information stored in the table is per VLAN. The entire table would need to be read for each VLAN configured.
2. Reading and displaying the entire table would cause a severe performance issue as one single interface could have hundreds or thousands of mac addresses in the forwarding table.

Notice in OneClick whenever you see a table, you see a box labeled "Get Next". The reason for this is at one time we used to collect and display entire tables. This caused severe performance issues. Now OneClick will only collect the first 100 entries from a table. If you wish to see more, you click on the Get Next button. You can still tell OneClick to get the entire table by clicking on the Get All button but again, if the table is large, it could cause severe performance issues.

It is not possible to display for the forwarding table to display all entries in the table because again, the information is stored per vlan and there is no way to configure OneClick to display for all vlans, this is outside of Spectrum.