Is there an equivalent of a ping component monitor in NPM? Need to ping an external node. (External nodes which don't have ICMP functionality, regretfully.)
Short of scripting it, of course.
Thanks!
Tools other than NPM within the solarwinds suite are one way to accomplish this. External nodes in NPM are not polled. WPM can do this in some ways, SAM can do this in some ways.
External nodes in NPM are not polled. WPM can do this in some ways, SAM can do this in some ways.
Curious in what ways SAM can ping external nodes (other than via a scripted monitor). If you know the way, please let me know...
Is SNMP polling allowed on the external node? If so, click on 'List resources' for the node and change the 'Status & Response time' option from ICMP to SNMP
There's no option to "list resources".
Don't believe there are any "stats & response time" choices for nodes set as "external" or "ICMP only". If you see any, please post screenshots.
You will have to change the node type to SNMP. Presumably, you added that as an External node because ICMP was blocked and didn't want it show up as down. Now that you can determine status purely via SNMP, you can change the node type to SNMP
Presumably, you added that as an External node because ICMP was blocked and didn't want it show up as down. Now that you can determine status purely via SNMP, you can change the node type to SNMP
Presumably? What if I presume you could hop on the next plane, spend a couple of weeks here and fix all my NPM and SAM problems for free? (I'll supply a daily pizza...)
Those nodes were set as external exactly because they are. These are nodes controlled by 3rd parties, with no SNMP functionality of any kind (that's available to us). Some of them allow pings and I wanted to see if I could avoid writing a script for it.
I think you and I face similar issues most of the time, akhasheni. Scripted monitor was kinda what I was getting at, just a script to ping every X minutes and report that back. The HTTP/HTTPS monitor template is effectively checking availability if that is an option, too.
The HTTP/HTTPS monitor template is effectively checking availability if that is an option, too.
HTTP monitor may work in some cases although ICMP (ping) traffic is principally different from TCP and HTTP ones, I heard. For my purposes, I use TCP monitor (basically port scanner) to check if a specific port on a target is open. Adding an ICMP monitor may help figure out if the target is down, or got firewalled - given that ICMP traffic (if allowed by the target) is considered the most benign.
Ping will certainly generate *less* traffic, but if ping and/or ping via SNMP aren't options then you don't have that many options unless they allow to ping via a proxy?
If you can't reach an external node you can't really do anything with it then, in that sense. That may be your limitation.
We have firewalls on which ICMP and SNMP are disabled. So, no status/no availability.
These are not as much external nodes as they are external services managed by 3rd parties - like Amazon AWS or 3rd party FTP sites for content sharing with partners and clients. Being a sysadmin, I want to know the uptime of these 3rd party services for SLA and preventive trouble-shooting purposes, so I monitor these services via e.g. TCP Port 21 on a DNS name of that FTP site. Ideally whatever port / handshake the service uses. SNMP is out of question of course.
Now, say, it went down, TCP port 21 is no longer open on that FTP site. Did it go down because...
This is where ICMP could help (if allowed): if the site still pings then it's (1) more than likely, and this saves a lot of time potentially. If you have 40 such sites (like we do), this could become interesting... Although NPM apparently doesn't support DDNS... so reason (4) could be, "Solarwinds bug".
I might try HolyGuacamole's VB script one of these days.
So this isn't just about ICMP being less traffic, it's more, what options are available to me to check on external service availability, and if the service is down, what options would help me zero down on the root cause?
