Cisco Network Monitoring Tools

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a communication protocol that lets you monitor managed network devices including routers, switches, servers, printers and other devices that are IP-enabled, all through a single system.

With Opsview Monitor and Opsview Cloud, you can receive SNMP traps from any device, translate the traps using SNMP MIBs (Management Information Bases), and apply rules using a 'rules engine' to determine whether to raise an alert and what the alert message should be.

SNMP polling is provided through quick-to-create checks which poll a single OID (Object Identifier) given either the OID as a number, or the name based on a MIB. This includes SNMP walk functionality where Opsview scans the device and returns the SNMP data for the user to select which OID they want to poll as part of the check.

This allows users to add their own SNMP monitoring of simple devices such as temperature sensors, fan speeds, and so on, without the need to write any code or use the command line.

Opsview’s Flow Collector Module is an add-on module which enables the collection and analysis of flow-enabled network devices, such as NetFlow from Cisco routers, sFlow from HP Switches and more.

The main benefit of flow protocols such as NetFlow and sFlow is that they allow you to look ‘inside’ the connection to see not only that the ‘link is 95% utilized’, but to understand why, i.e., is a user downloading large files continuously, is a router misconfigured, etc. In turn, this will allow you to quickly pinpoint offending applications and take steps to mitigate any issues, perhaps by increasing bandwidth, re-routing traffic or optimizing configuration.

Opsview’s Net Audit Module allows you to easily backup (using RANCID) any network configurations, providing visibility via one of your dynamic dashboards, and alerting you of any changes that might have been made. For example, with more remote working and more home working, you may have had to make numerous configuration changes to your network. If you do not have a backup of that configuration, it is going to take a very long time to recreate.

Using a networking auditing tool, this risk can be removed, allowing network administrators peace of mind and a view not just into the performance of the router or switch, but also a view into the actual configuration itself.

"Software-defined" refers to any technology that involves both software and the virtualization of some physical computing, storage or networking/communications device. Software-defined represents a new class of products where the software is the focus and is used to provide the solution rather than the hardware. For example, in years past, data center growth was often a hardware path and software was used to support the function. However, traditional networks can’t cope up and meet current networking requirements such as:

• Dynamic scalability
• Central control and management
• On the fly changes or experiments
• Less error-prone manual configurations on each networking node
• Handling of network traffic (which has massively increased due to boom of mobile data)
• Server virtualization traffic in data centers