Configuring WAN Monitor

OpManager's WAN monitoring feature ensures high availability of WAN links across networks, providing comprehensive performance monitoring to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Utilizing Cisco's IP-SLA technology, OpManager facilitates easy setup without requiring IPSLA expertise. It includes efficient data collection, proactive threshold settings, and Path Echo mode for precise troubleshooting.

OpManager's WAN monitoring also allows you to monitor your WAN links' availability, RTT, and traffic details. Furthermore, you can also visualize them in the form of reports and dashboards, helping you gather actionable insights.

• Pre-requisites for WAN monitoring in OpManager
• Steps to set up a WAN monitor
  
  1. Discovering a router and configuring it to send traps
  2. Adding a new WAN monitor in OpManager

Prerequisites

OpManager primarily relies on Cisco's IP-SLA for monitoring the WAN and the prerequisite therefore is that the device should be a Cisco router and must have IPSLA agent enabled on it. Almost all the routers from Cisco are enabled with IP SLA agent and OpManager supports IOS version 12.3 and above. OpManager uses SNMP to query the Cisco routers for the links' performance data. IPSLA familiarity is not a prerequisite. You just need to tell OpManager which links you want to monitor. OpManager provides an intuitive configuration wizard to help you configure all the IPSLA parameters for monitoring the WAN health.

Steps to set up a WAN monitor in OpManager

Using OpManager, you can now monitor the availability and latency of a WAN link / path. A WAN link mentioned here is the path between the router in your main office and the one in the branch office that you wish to monitor.

1. Discovering a router and configuring it to send traps

• Add (discover) the router in your LAN to OpManager. And ensure that the snmp read and write community are configured properly, for that router. To know how to add a new device to OpManager, click here.
• Configure the cisco router to send traps to OpManager. Alerts are shown based on the traps received in OpManager. To configure OpManager server as the SNMP Server receiving traps for the routers, telnet the router and type the following command:
  

  snmp-server host <OpManager server IP> traps <host community string> rtr

  For instance, if the OpManager host IP Address is 192.168.18.128, and the community string is private, the command would be:

  snmp-server host 192.168.18.128 traps private rtr

Adding a new WAN monitor

1. Go to Network → IPSLA → VoIP Monitor and click on the Add new Device option on the top right corner.
2. Enter a name for the monitor.
3. Select the source router from the list of routers discovered in OpManager and then select the relevant interface of the source router.
4. Specify the destination IP Address either by using the 'Search' option to pick from the discovered routers, or directly enter the IP Address and click 'Add' and submit the details.
   

   

5. You will see the summary of the monitor you are about to configure. Now click 'Apply to device' to submit the details to the device. This will take a few seconds to be configured. Refresh the page after a few seconds to see the new monitor. The data is collected every hour, from the time you have configured.
   

   

To edit any of the configuration details, go to the respective template, make the changes and save the details. When you create a new monitor, the updated values take effect. When the configuration is complete, the router starts collecting the data at the specified frequency i.e. 60 seconds (default value). OpManager updates this statistics (collected data) every hour and the reports are generated after one hour of configuration.