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Newbie to Network Monitor need guidance.

Hi,

We have a environment With Dell SonicWALL connected with 3 WAN Links. At core switches end we have Cisco catalyst 6500, At Distribution switches end we have Cisco 4500 and at access switches end we have 2960-S Switches. My boss has told me to check for a Network Monitoring tool. Now the question is from where shall I start from ? What do I need to setup a Network Monitoring manager, which can give real time bandwidth utilization for our environment ?

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silverbacksays

Hey fahadahmedsyed‌,

Looks like you're going to need both Network Performance Monitor and Network Traffic Analyzer. What I would do is download the evaluation versions of both, install them, and see what you get. NPM will give you the availability, compute usage and interface utilization for your devices, whilst NTA will give you true network usage for all kinds of data going across, out of and in to your network.

You're going to need to ensure all devices are configured to allow SNMP communication from whichever IP address belongs to the server you install these modules on,and you will also need to configure the devices to export flow data for the important interfaces to the same IP address.

Let me know if you need any further help. Basic pointers are that for a trial, you could install it all on a single server, but in production you're going to need three servers for this, one for the primary polling engine, and two for SQL. One SQL will be for the primary SolarWinds Orion database, and the other will be for NTA Flow Storage Database, a feature implimented in NPM 4.x. Let your boss know the potential investment he'll need in hardware if he wants to implement these tools, as he'll need to budget for it. For the license cost, you're better off speaking with SolarWInds sales directly

fahadahmedsyed

Hello,

Thank you for the valuable reply. Please check and correct me if am wrong, please check the points below to setup from scratch.

1. One server is needed for SNMP i.e Network Performance Monitor with SQL Database and enable SNMP on Cisco Switches. Is that right ?

2. One server is needed for Netflow i.e Network Traffic analyser with SQL Database and I have to configure Netflow version 5 on Cisco Switches for traffic flow. Is that right?

3. Will solarwinds NPM will be act as SNMP Manager ?

silverbacksays

Hey fahadahmedsyed‌

To answer your questions:

Best practice is to install NPM on one server, and have an additional server with SQL server installed ready, to house the main SolarWinds Orion database. So two servers, just for NPM and it's database. Your network devices will need to be configured to allow SNMP queries from the IP address of your NPM server.
You install NTA on the same server that you installed NPM on, but you have a third server ready with SQL installed, to house the SolarWinds NTA Flow Storage database.
Using the above examples, only the NPM server will be sending out SNMP requests. This is known as your Primary Polling Engine.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you need any more assistance.

rharland2012

You don't need SQL on the box that houses the FSDB, right?

I know *I* certainly don't have SQL on that box and it works perfectly.

fahadahmedsyed

Hello,

Thank you for explaining in detail. One last question:

For two SQL Database servers what should be the hardware configuration for the Database server ? Also as you explained we require one server for NTA and NPM, What should be the configuration of single server which will host both NPM & NTA?

Also let me know how does licensing will work?