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IMPORTING OF DEVICES' INTERFACE DESCRIPTIONS

When importing devices, and chosing which monitors to enable, if I chose bandwidth monitoring I notice that the names of the interfaces get imported and I can then chose to include this name as part of the monitor name. That's great, but I have descriptions configured on the routers/switches' interfaces that tell me specifically what that interface connects to which would help us out more to see that information instead of the name of the interface.

For example, the name of an interface might be "FastEthernet0" but the description I've put on the router says "CONNECTION TO CORE SWITCH".

Is there a way to include these interface descriptions when importing/scanning devices?

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chris.lapoint

There isn't currently, but I'll add it as an enhancement request for this one. If there are others interested in this feature, please speak up to help us prioritize.

simonpt

Hi Chris

This would be a useful feature, but I recommend that it be implemented as optional. That is, when you do a scan you should be able to specify whether you want ipMonitor to use the interface name or the alias as the monitor name. Then each customer can choose which naming convention works best for them. You were probably thinking along these lines anyway, but I thought I better mention it.

I got caught out with this when using another monitoring product that added ifAlias naming support but didn't make it discretionary. When we did a rescan of a core switch, all the interface names changed and made our network map far less helpful. The connecting links ended up having the same names as the end nodes (eg. link: SERVER1, node: SERVER1) whereas previously we could easily identify the physical port from the map (eg. link: Gi1/0/1, node: SERVER1), which made fault resolution much easier.

This scenario obviously isn't applicable to ipMonitor today, but it highlights that there may be downsides to using ifAlias that people may not be aware of. I, for one, was looking forward to ifAlias support in the other product but quickly changed my mind when I saw what it did to the maps.

HTH

Rgds, Simon

chris.lapoint

Simon, thanks for the thoughtful feedback based on your experiences. I was actually thinking something more along these lines:

Update Bandwidth monitor so that it includes a property field for interface description. This field should be populated during discovery and rediscovery operations
Update all dashboard resources that display Bandwidth monitors to include the interface description field as a displayed column

Let me know what you think of this approach.

simonpt

Chris

Thats sounds good too.

Will be interesting to hear if that meets blizejr's requirements or if ipMonitor needs to go a step further and offer for the alias to be used when generating the monitor name.

Rgds, Simon