It’s Offical: IBM i Does Not Support sFlow

For a project I’m working on, we’re trying to determine how much network traffic travels to a particular IBM i partition and what IP addresses the traffic is coming from. The purpose is to model the traffic before we move the partition to another network, so we have a big enough telecom pipe to accommodate incoming data.

We put a Cisco layer three switch between the network and my IBM i partition so we could capture the traffic. But our network manager also wanted to know whether we could natively analyze network data on our IBM i by using an sFlow server. Sponsored by the sFlow.org consortium, sFlow samples and monitors data running through networked, wireless, and host devices. An sFlow server is handy for analyzing network traffic, as I wanted to do here.

I called IBM and found out that no, IBM i does not support sFlow. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any third-party packages that analyze traffic to the extent that we need for the project, so I don’t have that option either. If anyone knows of a package that will do this, please drop me an email.

So as a suggestion to IBM, it might be a good idea to add an sFlow server or similar data traffic analysis package to the IBM i software. It could come in handy for situations like this as well as for determining what IP addresses are sending the most traffic to a particular interface.

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