Hi Joe,

Does this mean that I still can manage non-cisco devices in CiscoWorks LMS 2.5, but I am unable to monitor it in DFM since DFM is using ICMP? Thank you.

This means that there is some very basic support for non-Cisco devices in one piece of LMS, but LMS as a whole is designed for managing Cisco devices.

Adding a non-Cisco device from DCR into DFM will put the device in an unknown/unsupported state.

What are my alternatives if I want to manage & monitor non-cisco devices?

There are some Open Source tools such as cacti, jffnms, nagios, MRTG, PRTG, Smokeping, etc. that provide a ride variety of vendor support through standard and proprietary SNMP objects. They can provide fault and performance monitoring capabilities.

I have heard of Nagio but it runs on Linux. Do you know how good this tool is and is it easy to understand and work with? You also mention MRTG. How can MRTG provide fault monitoring? I use MRTG for performance monitoring (bandwidth utilization). Thank you.

I think nagios is easy to work with. As for why MRTG, I was mentioning both fault and performance management tools. Smokeping, for example, does response time analysis of network and application protocols.

Is Smokeping an add-on module for MRTG? What kind of alert/alarm it can generate? Can it generate e-mail alert? Can the alert message be customized?

See http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/ for more details on Smokeping.

Are there any free Windows based tools that can provide fault and performance monitoring?

free? Why free? The amount of time you are going to spend getting something like Nagios working as well a commerical NMS is far more valuable than the cost of this software. Are you a student? Most professional organizations would rather spend the money and have support when something breaks, then attempt to "build" their own NMS.

Well anyway, You can manage up to 20 devices with Manage Engine Opmanager, a very good fault reporting suite, that does monitor bandwidth utilization, cpu, among other things. That wont cost you a thing.

Thank you Joseph. My company does not have budget for another Network Management Suite.