Monitoring guide

Active network monitoring is a must to gain accurate and real-time visibility of the health of your network. Monitoring enables you to address urgent needs and focus on the long term health of your network. However frequent monitoring can become a huge strain on your network resources as it generates a lot of traffic on the network, especially in large networks.

In this page we have discussed how to effciently and effectively use our network monitoring tool OpManager to enhance your network performance by maximizing uptime and minimizing downtime.

What you need to monitor

Monitor availability

Uptime is the most fundamental aspect of any network, so monitoring the device availability by configuring polling interval is essential. OpManager by default uses the ICMP ping to poll a device. You can also use SNMP/TCP to monitor availability.

Monitor performance

Some of the key metrics that one has to monitor in any network are:

  • CPU Utilization
  • Memory Utilization
  • Interface Traffic
  • Packet loss
  • Latency.
However, the primary performance metrics to be monitored may vary for each device model. For example, for VMware, the important metrics are CPU Wait time, CPU Ready time, Memory Balloon etc.

Supported vendors and device models

OpManager is a comprehensive monitoring solution that can monitor the health and performance of routers, switches, firewalls, printers, virtual servers, storage devices and everything that has an IP and connected to your network. Overall, it supports more than 11000 device types and 450+ vendors. For each device model, OpManager has built-in device template that holds the data of performance metrics that will be associated to a device for monitoring. If you have a device in your network that is not supported, you can create custom a device template to monitor that device.

Pre-requisites for monitoring

  • To monitor devices, you need to perform network discovery and add the devices into OpManager.
  • Before performing discovery, please ensure that the device credentials are configured. Credentials are essential to access monitoring information of devices as well as to understand the classification (vendor/type/monitoring protocol).

Monitoring process

Generally when devices are discovered, metrics are associated based on its device template. For each device model, OpManager has built-in device template that holds the data of performance metrics that will be associated to a device for monitoring performance. OpManager communicates with devices using different protocols such as SNMP, CLI, WMI.

The monitoring information of devices can be accessed in multiple ways:

  • Snapshot page: Navigate to Inventory and select a device, the page that opens is the device snapshot/summary page. It gives comprehensive, in depth information on the device availability, performance and other associated details.
  • Dashboard: OpManager has a default dashboard that gives consolidated overall picture of the network. You can drill down from the dashboard to understand in depth information.
  • Map visualization: To simplify monitoring, you can use maps and other visualization platforms such as Rack views, 3D views, business views and populate all your devices to monitor them in a single pane of glass.
  • Reports: Monitoring data will be stored and can be accessed in the form of reports. By default OpManager has 100+ reports that can be scheduled. Apart from this, you can also create reports that cover specific data that you want to view with the help of advanced reports.