This discussion has been locked. The information referenced herein may be inaccurate due to age, software updates, or external references.

You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a similar question you can start a new discussion in this forum.

Monitoring Separate Private Network

mruzicka over 16 years ago

I've looked through the forum and the SolarWinds KB and didn't see an answer to this question so thought I would pose it here.

Is it possible to monitor devices behind a firewall that are on a separate private network from a centralized ipMonitor installation?

The issue is, I have a number of devices on the same network or on public IP's that I can monitor just fine, but I also have some devices that are not not on the same network as the monitoring server. I'm not sure if ipMonitor can do anything like this, but I'm imagining something like a passive check in Nagios where I can install some sort of agent or client on a remote server and have it periodically fire back status reports to the monitoring server. I'm not sure if I'm just missing how ipMonitor would handle this or if it is only capable of monitoring devices it can directly connect to.

Sorry if this answer has already been discussed or documented other places. Thanks in advance for any input.

0 Peter.Cooper over 16 years ago

Hello mruzicka,
Traditionally, in that scenario we recommend another smaller license of ipMonitor to perform bidirectional coverage (and both ipMonitors monitoring each other) at the remote site. What's cool about that scenario is that you get more assurance that your alerting facilities are intact (without *needing* to mess with modems and sms assuming that both sites don't go down simultaneously).
If that's not an direction you'll go down, you have the VPN alternative, and also a "ping back" technique. As an example, you could use "validator.w3.org" to contact your site and download content (don't abuse them folks, this is just an illustration). The technique is to use a third party web page to do contact your servers and verify if things are okay. A few special ASP.NET pages, and you can build your own agent quickly by doing something within the web page and outputing the results (which ipMonitor would read).
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Cancel
0 mruzicka over 16 years ago in reply to Peter.Cooper

The issue is that we potentially have dozens (or more) mini-private networks (we're a colocation facility) that we would need to monitor so the separate instances wouldn't really work in our case. We'll definitely look into the custom agent/web page option you suggested though. Thanks.
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Cancel

0 bleearg13 over 16 years ago in reply to mruzicka

The issue is that we potentially have dozens (or more) mini-private networks (we're a colocation facility) that we would need to monitor so the separate instances wouldn't really work in our case. We'll definitely look into the custom agent/web page option you suggested though. Thanks.

Are these your customer's networks that you're monitoring? If so, are they all physically in the same location? You might want to think about creating a special monitoring network on the back-end of your colo network, to which all your monitored customers connect. Through the use of private VLANs and/or "transparent" firewalls, you could provide some level of security so customers cannot see each other through the mgmt network.