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Monitoring Internet Connectivity

ahanson89 over 11 years ago

Greetings! I have a quick question regarding the best method for monitoring Internet connectivity across multiple physical locations.

We have several locations, spread across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern US, with each location using a SonicWALL TZ for both connection through our site-to-site links, as well as to the internet. We already have the SonicWALLs monitored in NPM as nodes, with the interfaces monitored for uptime, traffic and errors. Our SonicWALLs are configured with X0 as the LAN interface, with our internal IP assigned, and X1 as the WAN interface, with an external IP assigned.

I was wondering if there was an easy way to monitor internet connectivity on each of the WAN interfaces of our SonicWALLs. We have considered just added them in as basic ICMP nodes, via the external IP, but I want to be sure that there may not be another way to do this, without using additional node licenses when we don't need to.

Thanks,

ahanson89

Top Replies

branfarm over 11 years ago +1

Hi there, Adding the external IP's as ICMP only nodes is a really easy way to accomplish what you're looking to do, but as you said, it will add to your overall node count. Unfortunately I don't really…

0 branfarm over 11 years ago

Hi there,
Adding the external IP's as ICMP only nodes is a really easy way to accomplish what you're looking to do, but as you said, it will add to your overall node count. Unfortunately I don't really know SonicWall devices, so I don't know what type of capabilities they have. What types of devices do you have inside of your network? Any routers or switches that support IP SLA? If so, another thing you could try is to set up an ip SLA probe to ping a well known internet address. With that in place, you could either create a UnDP to probe the status of the sla operation, or have the sla operation configured to send traps when loss is detected, then alert in NPM on those traps. Admittedly, Solarwinds does have an NPM add-on product that makes this very easy to configure, but you can do it without it (with much more work... I"m not trying to downplay any products here).
Hope that helps,
Brandon
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0 ahanson89 over 11 years ago in reply to branfarm

Thanks for your response! We've been considering changing all of the existing SonicWALL nodes in our network to use the external IP. This actually ended up helping with another issue we had where SNMP would not work over the internal IP, but would over the external. We haven't decided if this is the best solution, yet, so I'll be sure to leave a post here when we've come up with a final decision.
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0 ahanson89 over 11 years ago in reply to ahanson89

We did ultimately decide to use external IPs for monitoring our SonicWALL deployment. This had two benefits, as mentioned before:
1. It allows us to monitor the status of Internet access at all locations.
2. It allowed us to get SNMP responses working from one node that was being particularly finicky.
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