Monitoring/Alerting of Time-Critical Network Devices via SolarWinds

toyedeji

Hi All,

I'm new to thwack, but have used SolarWInds to support some of our systems for about 2 yrs now. I have a question I was hoping to get some assistance with as I'm just now getting more familiar with SolarWinds.

We have some network gear running a protocol that's highly time-dependent. We just had a power outage where a network device failed to restore it's internal time to the correct time after power-on, and reverted to a date/time that was of 2 months before the device was actually powered down.

Is there a way, or a reporting tool to configure within SolarWinds to poll, record, track and output the current time that the network device is seeing?

For example, I'd like to be able to configure SolarWInds such that I am alerted if a GPS Server or a LAN Switch drifts in time significantly enough from a set threshold to affect its performance. Any thoughts, input or experience with this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

dmartzall

I would run a MIB walk on the device from which you are wanting an alert.  If you can find a MIB entry that returns a date/time, then you would be able to check what it shows quickly.  As far as having it alert when it drifts, that will be more tricky.  For example, if your NTP source is out of sync you will get hit with a bunch of alerts.  Also in order for it to verify the time is in sync you would have to align all polling to also include hitting your NTP source for comparison.  You could have it compare to the SW time, but again if it goes out of sync it's not very useful.  The best option for alerting for the time being off is to set up a trap for when it is unable to connect to NTP/SNTP. sources.