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question about monitoring the loopback interface

I know this has been discussed before, and I've been picking up & scanning some of the previous posts, but I still have a question regarding this. It appears that the goal in monitoring the loopback address is to minimize a false alert that a device has experienced a physical down (eg. router has lost power or crashed, or otherwise become inaccessible completely). While I see this as useful, wouldn't you as well want to monitor & alert on all the other IP interfaces as well? For example, someone could mistakenly remove or administratively down a VLAN or IP interface, a fiber connection could be broken or pulled, or any number of other conditions.

Because of these other cases, I'm confused as to why the strong emphasis is put on the video/training series /etc. on the monitoring of the loopback.

Comments?

Thank you!

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savell

You don't generally just monitor the loopback address.

Interfaces are also critical items to monitor - however you may not want to monitor every interface on a device (i.e. switch ports for example). Loopbacks are useful, as they are not dependant upon a physical interface.

For example, you may have a router with two paths (WAN links) into it. If you were to add the device using the IP address of the first WAN link and that link were to go down, then your alarming system will see the device as being down - even though the second WAN link may be now servicing all the traffic.

With the loopback address, when the primary link goes down, access to the loopback could be maintained on the secondary link - and your alarming system will still have visibility of the device (and hopefully show the primary WAN link in a down interface status).

Dave.

meddle01

Thanks for the response Dave. In the case you example here, isn't the getting the alarm for that link being down correct, and wouldn't you want to get that alarm, and upon receiving that alarm, wouldn't you then access that router via the second IP/interface and investigate and attempt to resolve the issue?

Thanks again.

savell

In the case of monitoring via the WAN interface, all you would see is the device down, which would be incorrect.

Of course you could logon to the device and see that the first WAN interface had gone done, but wouldn't it be better to monitor via the loopback and actually have an alarm that reflects the actual error?

Dave.