Forum Discussion

Jerry_Wiltse's avatar
11 years ago

Automatic Network Device Interface Filtering

With regard to monitoring network devices: switches, routers, firewalls, etc. Other enterprise monitoring platforms have instituted the following logic which would be both feasible to implement in LogicMonitor, and extremely valuable for monitoring said network devices.

Problem: An environment with 100+ 48 port switches for example, administrators only typically want to apply alerts on selected ports (link down, bandwidth util, etc). Also, potentially only care to collect any statistical data on selected ports in order to minimize useless statistic gathering and useless alerts. However, manually specifying which ports to monitor on a device-by-device basis from within the monitoring system is often not-feasible.

Solution: Institute regular-expression matching logic on the monitoring of interfaces of network devices based on \'\'interface Description\'\' gathered from SNMP. If I put any of the keywords of choice such as \'\'Monitored\'\' or \'\'Server\'\' or \'\'Router\'\' in the description of an interface on a port, then LogicMonitor should apply all relevant monitoring policies on that interface. Without this keyword in the description, ignore the interface. This puts the \'\'choosing\'\' of which interfaces to monitor in the hands of the device configuration. From the perspective of a network device administrator, this approach is much more favorable than doing anything manually through the LogicMonitor web GUI (or any monitoring GUI). .

Notes: This is not a simple request to implement. There would be a great deal of supporting logic that would have to go into making this feature successful, however it has been done before, and is about the only feasible way for an administrator of 500+ near-identical branch switches and routers to effectively control which interfaces are monitored. However, this filtering logic could potentially be applied to certain parameters on servers which can have descriptions, such as Disk Drives, Network Adapters, etc.