I manage a mid-sized Industrial automation network. I have roughly 10 client machines and 4 server machines.
Up until now, we didn’t have a GPS clock in the network. One of the machines, server-A, was working as a time server & NTP was used to sync other machines.
Now that we are installing this new GPS clock I need to configure server-A to receive the time from the GPS clock so that all the Clients + Servers will get time-synced with the GPS clock.
We have manageable Cisco switches in the network and I want to know if I need to plan to do time sync for the switches as well? I did not think so, but I am not sure. Can you please explain why time sync is required on managed switches and what may go wrong if these switches do not have synchronized times?
Best Answer
Your network devices (routers, switches, etc.) should be using NTP to keep their times synchronized. The primary benefit is for the logs and troubleshooting. When you look in the logs on your syslog server while trying to troubleshoot network problems, your job will be much more difficult if the times are not synchronized.