Newbie question: should I be monitoring packet schedulers and wan mini port?

Could you please elaborate a bit more on your monitoring project, so the community might be able to help a bit more?

To answer your question: I ususally do not monitor Interfaces that are "WAN-Miniport" and "Packet Scheduler"

Cheers,

Holger

Thanks for the quick response.  We currently have 40+ sites in roughly as many cities, with monitoring of core infrastructure - routers, switches, WLAN and APs, etc. and also ESX hosts and virtual environment.  Mainly node and interface monitoring with a few AppInsight for SQL instances and a few other applications.

Thanks,

Tommy

There's reason to only monitor actual interfaces and drop items such as the Packet Scheduler.  Removed items won't count against your license and it will cut down on the database size, CPU and memory usage.  If you are using your WAN-Miniport, by all means monitor it, but if not I would disable it on the router and remove it from NPM.

As HerrDoktor said above you may give us a general idea of the your network and we'll gladly give you some feedback.

If working with Windows systems and asking this, I'd recommend rather than using SNMP to monitor (since NIC properties are being broken out by wan miniport, packet scheduler, etc) use WMI to monitor these systems.   It's a bit more overhead, but even going full tilt on some of our systems I haven't seen any impactful overhead to it.  You also get simple interface information rather than each of the components of the NIC to monitor.

Totally agree with mharvey there. Switch the polling interva to wmi and you don't have to worry about this question.

I agree on the WMI, but if you are limited to just SNMP, you do not need to monitor the packet schedulers nor the WAN Mini ports. Only the main interface for that server. That is what we are doing.

In my environment, if there's an active link with packets flowing or stats incrementing, I monitor it.  But that's why I have four "Unlimited" poller licenses, and am getting a fifth.

If your WAN mini-port is not connected to anything, not being used, don't monitor it--unless you want info that could be used for a security audit that shows if/when that port is up or down.

Anytime you can get information in a timely manner without eating up another Solarwinds "element" of monitoring, you're saving license element/node counts for something else more important that will come in tomorrow or next year.