Syslog and SNMP Traps can provide a vast amount of information to help you to troubleshoot and identify problems on your network as they arise. Being able to view and interact with your log data alongside performance data in a single pane of glass can provide an additional layer of visibility into your environment and reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot and resolve issues. With Log Manager for Orion
(LM), you can do just that! Let's say you've just installed Log Manager for Orion and are excited to start aggregating, searching and charting your log data to identify and troubleshoot problems. However, you have to go through the cumbersome task of configuring your devices to starting transmitting syslog and SNMP Traps to Log Manager. Configuring a handful of devices can be straight forward, but what happens when you have a large environment with network devices from several vendors and different settings for syslog/trap settings for each vendor? This can be a real challenge, but with the help of Network Configuration Manager (NCM) you can dramatically reduce the time it takes to configure your devices to send logs to LM.
Network Configuration Manager includes predefined Configuration Change Templates (as well as templates shared on THWACK) which enables you to perform configuration changes in bulk across your devices. Several templates are included out of the box ranging from changing banners, configuring QoS policies and-you-guessed-it-syslog configuration! You can also create your own Configuration Change Templates by following the steps here.
The "Enable Syslog - Cisco IOS" template consists of various parameters along with the CLI commands required to configure syslog:
To start configuring your devices, you simply need to define the variables within the script and which nodes you'd like to apply this configuration to:
Once you've selected the nodes, you now specify the IP Address address of your Log Manager server, along with the logging level you'd like to apply. You should take some time to consider the appropriate logging level for your devices, as enabling low level logs such as informational or debugging can result in a high volume of logs being transmitted that may not provide value.
You are now ready to execute the script, or schedule the task to run at a later time. You can also confirm that the task has ran successfully via the Transfer Status page. Assuming the script has executed successfully on your selected nodes, you should now see your syslog appearing within LM's Log Viewer:
If you have some ideas on which syslog and SNMP Trap configuration templates that you'd like to see added to NCM, please provide your comments below.
