VNQM PRI Monitoring - Cisco Commands Used

Question

Hello,

I am working to set up the PRI Gateway monitoring for VNQM, and I need some information before I move on.

In the admin guide it only states that you need to have Config Terminal access. This is a broad statement and gives me no insight as to what commands I truly need to allow VNQM to run. I can't justify giving my Gateway devices a TACACS+ or Radius controlled account that has full access and no command restrictions on these said devices.

Does anyone have a list of what "Show" commands are being used so I can properly limit my account to the commands it needs.

Again looked in the Admin guide, but it only states I need access jump in "Config Terminal" mode which isn't clear as to what commands VNQM will actually be running.

rjnicholson · Answer

I'm aware of the ways VNQM can write SLA transactions to a node, and have used the functionality a few times.

The issue I was having was the telnet emulation that VNQM was doing was always wanting to pass "enable" to put me in privileged mode which for the PRI polling is not needed since the show commands used can be run from a read only account.

I opened a case and indeed found an issue, and just received my HotFix for the issue last night, and now I can poll PRI gateways.

For SLA's we set our own as we are a global company and in VNQM when building SLA transactions the defaults are always the same and for us we change how we set up UDP Jitter transactions based on location of the site.

For instance since we are global and an MPLS mesh network we use G729 for VoIP on lower bandwidth links outside of the US, and G711 in the states and for internal calling. With SLA setup in VNQM I have to choose one codec or the other to create SLA transactions and this isn't flexible enough for us so we resort to building them ourselves and then scanning the nodes for the transactions.

What I would like to see and will post a feature request soon is for the PRI Polling to also look at the DSP chips, so that we can see Channel utilization on the PRI and not just overall utilization on the PRI. I think this can be done from SNMP or a command I need to dig deeper, and will place it as a feature request. This is essential for us since we build out our PRI's to use certain channels for inbound, and outbound call routing.

michal.hrncirik · Answer

Hi Richard,

good questions. VNQM uses SNMP write and CLI under global config for some of the IP SLA operations. Have you seen pages 106-120 in http://www.solarwinds.com/documentation/IPSLA/docs/VNQMAdministratorGuide.pdf ? Let me know if this doesn't answer your questions.

thanks,

Michal

rjnicholson · Answer

To add to this when I test using my account from the Edit Creds screen when adding a gateway the test will pass successfully, but when I try to save and submit. I get the following error.

Device may be down, busy, or credentials are invalid.

I can telnet from Putty to the device and log in and run the 3 given commands above with my account, but VNQM can't seem to get it to work.