Adding Another Polling IP?

Question

We are considering switching from WhatsUp Gold to NPM and are setting up a test environment. One issue we have run into is that during the scan NPM arbitrarily decides the polling IP, and that is the only IP that affects Up/Down status. With WhatsUp you are able to create device profiles with custom monitors. So whenever WhatsUp scans a Cisco Router, it will have a LAN monitor and WAN monitor setup automatically. Both of these will be tagged as "Critical" so if either one goes down it will show up on our homepage. Is a setup like this possible?

dburns865 · Answer

Thanks for the suggestions, I will give those options a try.

brscott · Answer

There are a few ways to do this.

1) Create a node for each interface, see Craig's response above.

2) Add a widget called "Down Interfaces", then edit the widget to filter down to what you want.

3) Add a "Custom Query" widget, and form the SQL/SWQL yourself.  This is the most difficult option, but also the most flexible.

4) There are always more options, this product is HIGHLY customizable.

Personally, I would start with #2 since it's the least amount of work, then return here to let us know how that is not exactly meeting your needs and maybe we can help point to the next step.

cnorborg · Answer

In general, unless a device routes traffic and has a backup link, if the connection back to the polling server goes down, you lose connectivity.   Which link that is depends on the perspective.   If the router is at the location the polling engine is for example, it would be its LAN interface.   If the router is at a remote location, it would be the WAN interface, because if the LAN link went down at the remote site you would still see the router as up.

In general for devices that route though, you would use a loopback interface to monitor the device, so as long as there was another connection back to the polling engine, the device should still be reachable.    ie: if you have two routers at a site and the WAN interface of one goes down, you can still get to the down router via the other one due once routing protocols converge.

For LAN devices, protocols like Spanning-tree will do similar things for dual homed devices.

That being said, if you want to monitor the same device by different IP's, you can set it up as another node using the other IP.   Depending on how you monitor it (ie: ping-only, external device, or full polling) might make a difference in how things work...