What are the steps of setting up networking hardware monitoring?
Q: I need to set up hardware pieces monitoring. What shall I start with?
A: To ensure health and performance of a network, networking devices should be set to being monitored, first.
IPHost Network Monitor can be used to set up the overall network monitoring. It is convenient to start with setting up basic PING and TCP monitors, to make sure the devices are available and the related services respond to connection attempts.
Most network devices nowadays support SNMP; it is possible to watch overall traffic flow, control the network devices interfaces and get notified of network resources usage amounts. Note that version 3 of SNMP should be used wherever possible, to make sure the access credentials are not leaked.
To monitor servers, disk state can be watched using S.M.A.R.T.-based software and providing custom SNMP data entries to be available through the unified interface. In case there are software readers for other system sensors (such as temperature, humidity, device health state etc), they can also be used to provide SNMP entries to be read and processes in a uniform way.
Finally, all the network switches, routers etc. should be monitored over all the available hardware data; proper alerts should be dispatched in a manner allowing notifications delivery even in cases of network connectivity failure. If ther are several network segments, remote agents can be used to collect all the monitoring data without interruption.
Related topics
Is it possible to monitor devices that are normally offline?
