Alternative polling method other than SNMP?

Hey everyone.

I'm trying to poll some Cisco ISR4431 and ISR4451 routers to see if they are in sync with the NTP servers.

Yes, I've searched for the specific OID (.1.3.6.1.4.1.9.9.168.1.1.11), and it exists, just not on my 4431 and/or 4451 routers. I already created a custom poller for the OID I found, but for these specific routers I'm kinda stuck.

So, I know that if I go to the CLI and do a 'sh ntp status' it will return a bunch of info. The very first line of which is whether the clock is synchronize or not.

"Clock is synchronized, stratum 3, reference is blah, blah, blah"

My question is this...

Is there a way for me to script a 'sh ntp status', have it run against those specific routers, get the data returned back, scrub the text looking for "Clock is synchronized", and then be able to put the status in the node somehow? Or at the very least, be able to send me an alert when it is NOT synchronized?

As we move forward, it seems like SNMP is fading out of existence and being replace with alternative polling methods. My Palo Alto's, for instance, offer a wide variety of information, as long as you are polling via API calls. Is SolarWinds exploring the use of various polling methods beyond SNMP? Should we look to get SolarWinds on this path now?

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custom polling

cisco isr 4451

solarwinds api

npm monitoring

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rschroeder

I can help you with the first half of your request--if you have NCM.

Just create a new NCM Job. Select the nodes against which it should be run, create the exact script and syntax you want run against them, and either fire it off manually or run it as a scheduled job.

What you do with the output . . . well, that's the part I'll leave to you. Share your ideas, please?

mthughes

Hi,

With the release of NPM 12.2 they have began to use CLI polling for monitoring Cisco ASA devices - there is no way to poll some information (Cisco AnyConnect users for example) from an ASA using SNMP for security reasons. I do not think that you can do your own customization and set up a UnDP CLI poller yet but I will explore this since I also have looked for this type of solution in the past. I will let you know if I find anything that allows you to create a CLI poller for other devices.

This at least lets you know that they are expanding their polling methods beyond SNMP. FYI, they already support the VMware API for polling ESXi Hosts and vCenter servers and SAM uses components that use perl to perform queries from the shell on Linux type servers. Those are the ones I primarily use but there might be other non-SNMP polling methods as well.

To help with your original issue, it might help to perform a snmpwalk against the two routers and scan through the values looking for responses that might be for NTP. I usually do one snmpwalk using the defaults to search the OID names and another snmpwalk requesting the numerical OID strings so that I can more easily identify the OID to use in the SolarWinds UnDP application.

Just in case you are not familiar with the snmpwalk syntax here are the two commands I always use (run from a Linux box)

snmpwalk -v 2c -c snmpstring 01.02.03.04
snmpwalk -v 2c -c snmpstring 01.02.03.04 -Ofn .1

Cheers,

mthughes

Hi,

I was looking through some settings and I did find that they added a CLI Device Template setting in the Edit Node Properties window. They allow you to edit the templates (via cloning) and apply them manually to a node as well, though automatic application is the default based on node's System OID value. I have not updated the template and applied it to a Cisco Node yet but it looks promising. I did not see this as part of the release notes for 12.2. I am not NPM 12.2 and SAM 6.5 - the latest for both as of February 13th, 2018.

NPM12.2-SAM6.5-CLI-Device-Template.png