I'm pretty sure you already know a lot around IMC. If you don't, and are still asking yourself what does this acronym mean, please check out this blog to get you started.
OK, so now you're ready … As you're probably already aware, most NMS systems features can be split into two categories:
- Management: Actively changing the infrastructure. This could be pushing configurations, upgrading firmware, etc.
- Monitoring: Watching the state of the environment. This could be passively receiving SNMP traps or Syslog messages, or actively polling using technologies such as SNMP or NQA
Today we'll focus on the monitoring part and more specifically on the performance monitoring part using SNMP.
First step: once you have installed IMC and discovered some network devices, by default IMC, will automatically get some performance data on these devices:
- CPU usage
- Memory usage
- Unreachability
- Response time (from IMC to the device)
This means, without doing anything else, you are already able to view this data (in live or in historical reports). Data can be useful in various contexts, so IMC provides you with multiple different ways to display this including:
- At the bottom of a device details (in the “Performance Monitor” section)
- Directly on the topology when you select a device (by default an average of these for the last hour):
- In the alarm browser if there are some exceeded thresholds:
- And in the default “TopN” Performance View:
By the way, concerning the topologies, it is also possible to activate the “Traffic Topology” to display directly on the links some performance data (bandwidth, error packets …):
Now you have the basics … I'm pretty sure most of you are thinking “Well nothing new there. I already know that! ”. So what else can we do?
In part two of this series we'll explore some of the other cool features such as playing with performance views, activating predefined monitoring indexes, adding your own indexes …
So stay tuned …