Monitor both interfaces?

Question

Hello,

We're a small local government agency who recently deployed Solarwinds Orion with NPM.  I added our core network switches and started monitoring just the downlink interfaces to the workgroup switches.  Once I got around to adding some of the workgroup switches as nodes and monitoring the uplink interface, I realized that I was almost out of interface licenses. I know the best route would be to upgrade our license but I'm not sure we can afford to upgrade our license at the moment. It will definitely be requested, but in the time being what would you recommend monitoring for link status and utilization; the core switch interface, or the remote switch interface?

What are the draw backs of monitoring just one interface in a link compared to both?

Thanks!

Richard

rmarriner · Answer

That's a good idea about monitoring the remote end so you don't have to change the monitoring on the core. That's definitely a plus. I did notice one caveat with only monitoring a single interface between two switches and that the L2 Network Topology information for the device shows it's connected to the remote node but doesn't show which remote interface or the speed of the link. This is nice to have readily available, but a description tag on the interface works just as well.

Thanks for the input!

superfly · Answer

It really shouldn't matter which end you monitor, they both will show the same info albeit "back to front".

I generally monitor the remote device uplinks so that if that remote device gets removed, I don't have to do anything to my core's monitoring settings. But if it's only a single uplink to the remote device, then generally I don't monitor the interface at all as normally bandwidth between core and comms closet isn't an issue.