News/Highlights
FineConnection is pleased to announce the availability of the new stable Monitor one version FP1.107.403 (January 24, 2010).
For superior trending and long-term analysis, Monitor one can act as a "front end" for RRD. RRD is a system to store and display time-series data. The RRD can also perfectly be used for exporting logged trending data to text files for use in spreadsheets or databases. More...
Monitor one provides an interface to messaging gateway systems, making it easy to send alert messages to pagers, mobile phones, PIMs and wireless devices.
The Monitor one "Desktop" option allows you to save Monitor one desktop configurations to the database for quick access later.
The new version also comes with a new licensing policy. The required license type is now only determined by the number of device objects on the network map from which you want to monitor uptime. The number of concurrently running Shooters (SNMP monitors) is now "unlimited" in all versions (was dependent of the license type!)
The new version allows you to define the font name, size and color for object labels on the network map.
SNMP monitoring
About SNMP monitoring
SNMP is a standard protocol that has wide acceptance in the industry and is flexible enough to be used in high demanding monitoring environments. SNMP certainly has its place in effective telecoms network management solutions, but this doesn't mean that any SNMP manager can provide adequate visibility and control of your network.
The typical off-the-shelf SNMP manager is not designed for displaying and processing telemetry data for effective network monitoring, especially for the kind of real-world monitoring tasks network managers most need performed. Usually these capabilities can be added to an SNMP manager, but often require substantial custom software development.
Monitor one has made this process easy by providing a method that allows easy creation of sensors that can poll any device variables through SNMP and present the collected data in the most suitable way. Before data is displayed, it can be processed by a user defined formula for better readability and understanding. In Monitor one terminology this method or option is named the “Shooter mechanism”.
Below is a short overview of what Monitor one is capable of regarding SNMP monitoring and the presentation of collected SNMP data.
Monitor one Shooter types
Graph Shooters can be used to retrieve and show numeric SNMP fields in real-time graphs. Monitor one supports four different graph types: Line, Line3D, Bar and Area and 1, 10 and 100 seconds polling intervals. If the "At runtime" keyword is used as the Target instance, the Graph will prompt for selecting the desired instance (port, interface, cpu-number etc) at runtime. This option makes it easy to zoom-in on different ports of a multi-port switch or router when trying to find performance bottlenecks.
If the "All Instances" keyword is used in the request 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!
While history data can tell you how your network will behave and what can be expected of it in terms of performance and reliability, real-time statistics are important for allowing you to perform detailed in-depth analysis.
Monitor one allows you to define SNMP queries that poll and show important health and performance data in tables, graphs or Meters. It is recommended to build SNMP queries (Shooters) that help you answer the most frequently asked questions. For every SNMP enabled device, define at least queries to retrieve the mib-2 "system" and "ifEntry" tables. For routers define queries to retrieve the "ipRouteEntry" table and to graphically display the traffic/load per interface. For application servers create files to show CPU utilization, user sessions, disk usage, buffer usage etc.
A Pie Shooter is useful for displaying things like the Top-talkers or the Top-5 busiest ports etc.
A Table Shooter can be used to retrieve individual SNMP fields or complete SNMP tables. All retrieved data is displayed in a two- or multicolumn table structure.
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 to display 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!