About Shooters

A Shooter is Monitor one terminology for what in other NMS products is called a "sensor" or a "monitor". A Shooter is in fact nothing more or nothing less than an SNMP request definition that can be saved to disk and can be read and executed whenever needed. A Shooter is defined at the Class level. Once created, you can use a Shooter to retrieve SNMP data for all devices of the class the Shooter was defined for.

A Shooter defines which OID values to retrieve from the SNMP agent of the device being monitored (OID + Instance), how to process these values (calculations) and how to display them (Table, Pie, Graph, Threshold etc…).

A Shooter is built up of two parts; the Shooter-body (container) and targets (requests). The Shooter-body has a number of properties that control how the Shooter behaves and how the output is displayed. The Targets define the actual SNMP requests. A Shooter can have multiple Targets.

The most important Shooter (body) properties are:

• Name
• Icon
• The Class (for which it is created)
• The type (Table, Graph, Meter, Pie, Threshold, History…)
• The polling interval (one shot or each 1, 10, 100 or 1000 seconds)

The most important Target properties:

• The Object Identifier (OID) of the SNMP field to retrieve.
• The Instance (hard coded as in .1, .9 etc or one of the keywords "At runtime" or "All instances"

You can build Shooters that:

• Read one or more SNMP MIB fields from an agent and show them in a table.
• Show SNMP values in 3 dimensional graphs in real-time.
• Monitor thresholds and trigger alarms
• Allow you to SET or WRITE SNMP OIDs
• Retrieve SNMP values and save them directly into the database as historic data for trending and long term analysis purposes.

Shooter Types

Currently Monitor one supports 8 different Shooter types, all developed for a specific task. The different types available are:

Table shooter

A Table Shooter can be used to retrieve individual SNMP fields or complete SNMP tables with a Get or Get-Next SNMP command. All retrieved data is displayed in a two- or multicolumn table structure depending on whether a GET or a GET-Next (walk) request was used.

Graph shooter

Graph Shooters can be used to retrieve and display numeric SNMP values in real-time graphs. The number in the Shooter icon indicates the polling interval.

If the At runtime keyword is used as the Target instance, the Graph will prompt for selecting the desired instance at runtime. This option makes it easy to zoom-in on different ports of a multi-port switch when trying to find performance bottlenecks.

If the All Instances keyword is used in the target then the values of all instances of the OID specified as the Target are shown in one Graph! The All Instances option makes it easy to show - for example - the load of all ports of a switch in one Graph for a better overview.

Threshold shooter

A Threshold shooter can be used to monitor numeric SNMP values and compare them with a threshold value. An event is generated if the value of the value exceeds a defined threshold.

History shooter

A History Shooter allows to collect and log history information from devices to the database for trending and long-term analysis purposes. Monitor one saves History information into two different databases, the native Monitor one databases and RRD's.

RRD is the Acronym for Round Robin Database. RRD is a system to store and display time-series data (i.e. network bandwidth, machine-room temperature, server load average). It stores the data in a very compact way that will not expand over time, and it presents useful graphs by processing the data to enforce a certain data density.

Set shooter

A Set Shooter allows to set/write SNMP fields. You can use Set Shooters to create simple configuration forms for managing network devices.

Meter shooter

The AnalogMeter shooter (also called just "Meter") can be used to show a value on an old-fashioned VDO-like meter. The Meter is especially useful for displaying utilization and usage etc. Be aware that a Meter Shooter is not able to show more than one value at a time because the Meter has only one needle!

SnipMon Gauge and SnipMon Graph shooters

SnipMon Shooters appear as small images below a device icon on the network map. They are updated in real-time and are especially useful if you want to have important or critical device information always directly at hand.

A SnipMon Gauge (a small meter) can for instance be used to display CPU- or memory utilization, temperature or used disk space. A SnipMon Graph is very useful for displaying interface utilization, number of running processes etc over a short period in a graph. If the mouse moves over a SnipMon, detailed information such as a description of the SnipMon and the last/most recent value is shown.

Pie shooter

A Pie Shooter is useful for displaying things like the Top-talkers or the Top-5 busiest ports etc.