In OpsMgr 2012 we have enhanced the capabilities around network monitoring. In this article I will demonstrate how to discover and monitor a network device.
This is also covered in great detail at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh205982.aspx
Launch the discovery wizard and select Network Devices:
Give a name for your discovery cycle, select the management server that you want to handle the network device discovery, then choose a resource pool. If you want only specific management servers or gateways, you can create a custom resource pool as I have done below, named “Network Monitoring Resource Pool”
Next up choose explicit discovery, or recursive. Since I am targeting a specific device, I will choose explicit. If you didn’t know all your managed network devices and wanted to discover them by reading the ARP cache of each discovered device, you can choose recursive.
Create a RunAs account. In this case – the RunAs account for network devices is simply the SNMP Community string. You can create as many as you need. I am just using the default which is “public” so I will create that.
Next up I click “Add” and type in the IP address of my router, leaving the rest at default settings.
Next I need to pick a schedule, if I want this discovery to run on a regular basis, and pick up and discover/monitor newly added network devices. For this example – I will choose to run manually.
Create the discovery, and you will see the following popup:
Choose YES to continue – this will automatically distribute the community string based RunAs account to any management servers in your resource pool, and to the management server you chose to execute the discovery.
In the admin console – you can see your newly created discovery rule:
You can follow the discovery process in the event log of the Management Server where you assigned discovery to run:
After a few minutes if discovery was a success – you will see your network device show up in the Admin console, under Network devices. Take note of the Certification value – if it states CERTIFIED it means the devices was recognized by the OpsMgr network equipment database and we will apply specific monitoring for that device.
Back in the monitoring pane – select Network Devices – and you will see we have discovered your device. In this case – I have a Cisco 1605 branch office access router:
Open Health Explorer for the device and you can see the out of the box monitoring provided for this specific discovered device:
For my device – we monitor ICMP and SNMP availability (as long as one of those is available we consider the device “up”)
Free memory, and memory pool fragmentation, and additionally CPU utilization monitoring.
We will also begin collecting performance data in the warehouse for each device, similar to the statistics that we monitor out of the box, such as memory, CPU, power supply, temperature and voltage sensors, and fans.
Taking use of the new Dashboards in OpsMgr 2012 – there is a network node dashboard that will give us a lot of cool “at a glance information” about this Network device:
