Monitoring Network Device Interfaces and Ports Status with Xian Io Network Manager for Ops Mgr 2007
By Roberto Alcocer
The Jalasoft team is pleased to be on the System Center Forum! This is our first blog post about Xian Io’s functionality in a series of eight. We tried to come up with solutions to problems that most Network Administrators encounter on a daily basis. Therefore, we are starting this series with a basic, yet interesting topic on monitoring your network device’s interfaces and ports.
As many Network Administrators would tell you, it is very critical to know whether the most important interfaces and ports of any network device such as a switch or router are up and available or if they suddenly change to another state such as down, disabled, unknown, etc. and thus be able to know if the connectivity to a particular server, sub- network, or Internet is interrupted or affected, so that this problem can be solved quickly.
Xian Io for Ops Mgr 2007 will precisely monitor any desired interface(s) in your devices and immediately generate an alert if the state of any port or interface has changed or is not healthy. The two basic rules on Xian that accomplish this task and are available for most of our supported network devices are:
- Interface operational status, which monitors the operational status of an interface, helping to detect if it reaches any critical status such as “down”.
- Port status, which monitors whether a port reached a particular state such as disabled, blocking, broken, etc. or if it simply changed its status.
Applying and configuring these rules in Xian Io is a simple task that consists in following these steps:
- Open the Xian console or, if you installed the Xian UI integration component for Ops Mgr, the Ops Mgr console.
- Select the device and open its properties dialog, double click on it if you opened the Xian console. On the other hand, if you opened the OpsMgr console, right click on the device, select “device type name”, then “tasks” and then “view device properties”.
- Once the device properties dialog is opened, click on the “active rules” tab.
- Click on the “Add” button, select “interface > interface operational status” and then click on the “OK” button.
- On the rule configuration wizard, click on the “parameters” tab, you will see that all of your device’s interfaces are listed, simply select the ones you consider important and want to monitor or unselect the nodes you do not want to monitor. Finally, select the states that will force the rule to send an event to Ops Mgr 07 (dormant, down, testing, unknown, up or if the state is changed) as on the screenshot below:
- Click on the “active rule options” tab and set the alert severity (for example to “error”), also set if the rule will collect performance counters and optionally, change or customize the name of the rule.
- Click on the “schedule” tab and set the interval of the rule execution (for example to “every 5 minutes”).
- Click on the “device update” tab and configure if a new discovered interface will be monitored and the criteria for this monitoring.
- Click on the “Finish” button and verify that the rule is now running on the “active rules” tab of your device.
You can perform similar steps to apply and configure the “port status” rule. Please note that you can have one or several of these rules monitoring a single device; for example, you can configure a port status rule to monitor certain ports with a defined schedule and alert severity and then create another port status rule with different parameters in order to monitor the remaining ports using different criteria.
Should you have any questions, comments please feel free to reply to this post, and we’ll make sure to send you an answer as soon as possible. For further information on Xian Io for Ops Mgr 07 please visit our website http://www.jalasoft.com/.
February 4th, 2008 at 6:15 am
[…] As many Network Administrators would tell you, it is very critical to know whether the most important interfaces and ports of any network device such as a switch or router are up and available or if they suddenly change to another state such as down, disabled, unknown, etc. and thus be able to know if the connectivity to a particular server, sub- network, or Internet is interrupted or affected, so that this problem can be solved quickly.(continue at source) […]
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