How to catch broadcast flooding on MikroTik devices

It took somehow in one network to determine where the jumps of broadcast traffic are coming from, because of which the CPU usage was increasing on devices and there were interruptions with the Internet.
The network equipment was used from MikroTik.

Having connected to MikroTik with the following command, let’s look at the traffic statistics on ports, namely the broadcast traffic “Rx Broadcast” coming to the port, since this is the packet counter, then the figure should grow if the flood comes, if it does not change, then all is well:

interface ethernet print stats interval=1

Here is an example of viewing the statistics of a specific port (where ether2 is the name of the interface, it may be different depending on how it was called in the configuration):

interface ethernet print stats from ether2 interval=1

See the list of ports/interfaces with the command:

interface print

In this way, by the chain we will reach the final port from which there is a broadcast flood and, if necessary, turn it off by the command (where NUMBER is the number of the port in order in the table which can be viewed by the command above):

interface disable NUMBER

To enable the port:

interface enable NUMBER

Via WEB or Winbox, you can see the statistics by opening the Interfaces menu on the left and in the Interface tab, let’s look at each interface.

Example of resetting port statistics:

interface ethernet reset-counters ether2
interface ethernet reset-counters ether2,ether3,ether4,ether5

On CRS models MikroTik, you can enable broadcast traffic control, for example, 100 packets per second on an ether3 port (similarly for other ports):

interface ethernet switch ingress-port-policer add port=ether3 rate=100 meter-unit=packet packet-types=broadcast

In the future, you can watch the network for example through the system Zabbix, in which you can configure the display of broadcast packet schedules and if the packet counter starts to grow, the system will notify you.

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