Port monitoring

Question

Hello community!

I'm new to solar winds Orion platform and i'm working on setting up the system.  I have some confusion on monitoring and licencing.  I'm familiar with SAM and the cool things it can do.  But what i'm trying to figure out is why you need a SAM seat to just check to see if a port is responding (http,ftp,smtp,pop,telnet,ssh,etc...)   I want to monitor simple service on a unix server to see if the port is responding but don't need super in-depth information that SAM provides.  I can see if you have a SQL server and need IO/connections/sec etc..  I just want to monitor a port status.  I've used several other monitoring tools and this is a pretty common/free feature.  Maybe i'm just missing something because i'm new to this platform.  Any help or direction would be awesome.   Thank you!

nickzourdos · Answer

Each component in SAM uses a license, that's how it works 
 You could always write a script that makes multiple checks at once. A Script Monitor component would only use a single license.

adatole · Answer

It will take some finageling, but you can use this SNMP table: 1.3.6.1.2.1.6.19.1 (tcpConnectionEntry) which has child table elements of:

tcpConnectionLocalAddressType,

tcpConnectionLocalAddress,

tcpConnectionLocalPort,

tcpConnectionRemAddressType,

tcpConnectionRemAddress,

tcpConnectionRemPort

The description is somewhat helpful:

"A conceptual row of the tcpConnectionTable containing information about a particular current TCP connection. Each row of this table is transient in that it ceases to exist when (or soon after) the connection makes the transition to the CLOSED state."

So you can use this to tell if a port is open, listening, etc RIGHT NOW, but crafting an alert to determine if a port is NOT listening at the moment will take a little work.

antonis.athanasiou · Answer

You are right, this will take 1 component out of your SAM licensing. You can leverage NetPath though, as lcsw2013​ suggested above in Re: Port monitoring which is a combination of ping+TCP connect. Bear in mind though you will need to setup different type of alerting (Trigger Object is now NetPath instead of SAM component etc.)