Re: LAN/WAN Monitoring

u3 · ‎04-24-2003

hi,

i am new to cisco gear and networking in general. my boss has asked me to monitor the corporate network and report on utilization, traffic and deal with any faults. we have 60 servers, 1500+ clients, 7 3640 routers, 20 1721 and a few cisco switches although most are 3com. clients dial in over ISDN and PSTN as well as local access. the 3640's are in our main sites and 1721's are in small sites. routers are connected together using dedicated serial lines varying from 128k to 512k. SNMP is not enabled on any of the gear as far as i know, will i need it? can anyone recomend any packages and reading material to help me with this task.

thanks

davidhvoss · ‎04-24-2003

U3,

I would strongly reccomend you introduce yourself to SNMP. This is the perfect reason to begin exploring this protocol. Enabling it on Cisco routers is very easy, made even easier by using CiscoWorks via an automated script. Reading about SNMP on CCO is a good start, but really, it's simple if you have a good SNMP software tool. There are only 4-5 Cisco commands you need to know to roll this out effectivly.

If you are on a budget (as we all are), please go to www.castlerock.com and evaluate SNMPc software. This is a great tool for only $700.00. It will monitor utilization, save the daily reports for you, as well as do many other things, such as notify you if an outage occurs. Many people will reccomend MRTG, which is free. If you know a thing or 2 about Perl, this will be easy for you, but I believe for the money SNMPc is the best software available.

Hope this helps. Sounds like you have an interesting project ahead of you.

David Voss, CCIE 11372

Internetgineer.com

b-hart · ‎05-07-2003

I agree with David about how great / free MRTG is. However I do not understand Perl but have not found it too difficult to get great looking util graphs. There is so much you can do with it.

look at www.mrtg.org or do a google search for mrtg

There are plenty of resources and config files out there.

I was monitoring ping reponse time. WAN / LAN utilizations. Device temperatures, VLAN utils, basically anything that was SNMP'able

Hope this helps.

Barry