Chapter 10. Managing Hardware and Environmental Characteristics

This chapter is geared toward analyzing the hardware and environmental characteristics of Cisco routers and Cisco Catalyst series LAN switches. Hardware and environmental characteristics typically are more responsive to fault management than to performance management. Environmental factors in particular lend themselves more to error-monitoring, with regard to power and temperature monitoring; this chapter will look at fault management of both environmental and hardware characteristics. In addition, it will look at the performance side with respect to the backplane or chassis in the devices by identifying the type and location of the cards installed in the modularized devices, like 7x00 series routers and 5x00 series Catalyst switches.

The chapter topics are organized as follows:

• Hardware characteristics of routers

• Hardware characteristics of Catalyst LAN switches

• Environmental characteristics of routers and switches

• Performance management data for router hardware

• Performance-management data for switches

• Error/fault data for router hardware

• Error/fault data for switch hardware

• Error/fault data for router environmental characteristics

• Error/fault data for switch environmental characteristics