Monitoring Remote Networks / Servers

I am using solarwinds npm/apm in a business consulting environment. I have multiple clients and remote networks that I was to monitor. I have gone through the turtorials but have not really found what I am looking for. Does anyone out there use this software in this manner?

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m_roberts

As a SolarWinds partner we have several customers who use SolarWinds Orion as an MSP solution.

As long as you have routing and ICMP/SNMP access to the devices at your client sites, you can easily monitor them. It is also very straightforward to provide your customers access to specific information for their devices, so they can see for themselves the levels of availability and KPI's.

There are potential issues with regard overlapping subnets you may have to work with, but again there are ways of dealing with this.

zagerm

We connect a lot of banks via dedicated MPLS, but we also just added a bank that has a VPN provider and we monitor their servers that they have on location. Just add SNMP to the servers, we have some other security in place, but made sure the IP's are allowed through our routers, firewall, and it works great.

arskhan

zagerm you are telling about adding snmp to the servers . is that the same thing as giving snmp communiy string. plz guide me what is the purpose for giving this and how we can give this to any server

ecklerwr1

For windows servers here a link to configuring snmp on the servers so you can poll them and receive traps from them with NPM. You can test the setup from NPM when you add the nodes. You need to make sure that snmp is permitted from your NPM to and from the devices you are monitoring. This would most likely be in the firewalls between NPM and your customers devices. Also unless you are going to use snmpv3 you just need to make sure NPM is using the correct read community string configured on your customers devices you are monitoring and if the devices will be sending traps to NPM that they use the correct community string for NPM. Good luck... you've come to right place :}

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324263

Congo

There are potential issues with regard overlapping subnets you may have to work with, but again there are ways of dealing with this.

What methods do you use?

byrona

I am using solarwinds npm/apm in a business consulting environment. I have multiple clients and remote networks that I was to monitor. I have gone through the turtorials but have not really found what I am looking for. Does anyone out there use this software in this manner?

As the other posters have mentioned above, this is a pretty common thing. We monitor devices spread out across the state. Mostly a matter of setting up the proper access on the devices and through the firewalls which protect them. If you follow what the folks above suggest you should have this up and running in no time.

The one thing I did want to point out is that SNMP data is transmitted in plain text. To secure your information you will want to use SNMP v3 for it's encryption or something else like a VLAN to your remote sites.

ecklerwr1

@congo

I don't have the problem these days but I used to monitor/manage mutliple customers with overlapping address space. As I'm sure you're aware many people use the 10.x.x.x address space and often start at 10.1.0.x /24. At the time we were using HP Openview network node manager to monitor these networks and at the time the version had a limitation the no duplicate IP's could be in Openview's database. The work around we used to overcome this was to use an intermediate address space and NAT every overlapping 10.x.x.x to an individual unique subnet. At the time we used the 11.x.x.x address space which is actually owned by the NSA or something but since we didn't route it anywhere but internally it didn't matter. Initially the group I worked with was doing the NAT on the firewalls which at the time were Checkpoint f/w's running on SUN Enterrpise servers but doing the NAT's throught the GUI was rediculous as we needed a static one to one NAT for each device. When I took the position I immediately moved the NAT to a router in front of the firewall which made making mass static NAT's as easy as pasting them into the router config from an excell spreadsheet I used to track all the static NAT's. It was a lot of housekeeping but at the time it was really about the only solution as we couldn't justify the cost of a seperate HP nnm for each customer and had to monitor the overlapping 10.x.x.x networks from one managment server.

Congo

I have either been doing 1:1 NAT's or adding secondary IP's to device NICs. I was just curious if there were any other clever solutions on the NPM side. We have hundreds of customers on overlapping subnets on our network, but they work in cisco land because of clever VRF use. I wish NPM could intelligently monitor down a VRF.

byrona

There are potential issues with regard overlapping subnets you may have to work with, but again there are ways of dealing with this.

What methods do you use?

Would it be possible to get an additional polling engine and place it at the remote site, have an internal interface in the private IP space to monitor the nodes and then an external interface to communicate back to the mother ship via something like a VPN?

Congo

Would it be possible to get an additional polling engine and place it at the remote site, have an internal interface in the private IP space to monitor the nodes and then an external interface to communicate back to the mother ship via something like a VPN?

That is very much so possible. But then you run into the conundrum: would you rather have SNMP data or SQL data going over the wire back to the mothership?

kornholio26

Did you ever get an answer for this?

alinabl05

Well I don't have much knowledge about this software but it helps to remote monitoring the network Managed IT Support Services | Telecom Management & Outsourcing Services