Visualizing the Network

A little more than a year ago we purchased a cheap network monitoring tool to inform us of problems in our environment before our customers did.  After reviewing several products we selected ActiveXpert's Network Monitor.  It's done a great job and we're happy with it.  But lately I've been getting this paranoid feeling... an uncomfortable feeling that comes from not being able to see into the network.  Not knowing the utilization levels at any given point in the network.  For all I know a broadcast storm could be slowing the network to the point of near failure. 

Well paranoia got the best of me a few weeks ago and I went back on the search for a monitoring solution that could provide a better view of network utilization.  During my search I revisited some of the 'runners-up' from my last go around.  One of them was a product call OpManger.  It was a great product, but a year ago was too buggy for me to select.  I'm happy to report that this is not longer the case (well, it still has a bug or two, but nothing major).  Not only does it allow you to visually see network utilization at any point in the network, but it also allows you to create business graphs of your network.  See the switch layout example below of our network.

(click image for larger view)

Let me give you a real world example of how this product makes my life easier.  A few days ago I noticed that our Internet connection was running a little slow.  I jumped into the OpManger web interface and checked the untilization of the Firewall's external interface.  The graphs showed that the T1 was fully saturated.  I then traced the traffic back through the network by finding the traffic on the switches to the specific desktop.  A quick walk to the desktop found a fantsy baseball website gone crazy.  A quick close of the browser and the problem was solved.  Below is a sample graph of the network utilization of the firewall (note this is not the graph of the problem timeframe)

There's plenty more vert cool stuff the tell about this product, but you'll have to see it for yourself.  You can download a free trial verson from the OpManger website.

Comments

[Jason Powell]

I'd be interested to hear what other products you have checked out before landing on opmanager. We've been experimenting with MRTG (mrtg.org) at Granger ... at my prior employment we had MRTG collecting data from about 50 some switches though it took my guys a while to create the monitoring webpages for that many units.
We've also recently got Sonicwall's ViewPoint utility installed which has really helped us monitor firewall stats.

[Nick Airdo]

Jon wrote a nice article on ChurchCrosstalk (http://it.churchcrosstalk.com/CROSSTALK/Articles/215.aspx ) a while back when he was making his original selection. You might still find it handy.

[Jon Edmiston]

The article that Nick references was done after our first review a little more than a year ago. There's basically two features we are looking for 1.) Proactive Monitoring w/ Notification 2.) Historical Statistics of all major IT assets (servers, switches, firewalls, PBX, etc.)

I've used MGRT back in my Solaris days and it works real well. We decided not to go that route because it's pretty manually intensive especially if you want to monitor several stats on servers.

We also have Sonicwall firewalls and use Viewport. The problem with Viewport is that it does an excellent job at monitoring the firewalls, it's limited to just that. OpManager (and tools like it) provide a single view at the entire environment.

With it I can be alerted when the office T1 is saturated and walk back through the switch ports to find the offending system. If I'm still having trouble I can then move to specialized tools like Viewport to help.

Jason, reading your blog I see that you have a Fellowship One check-in system using Zebra printers. One thing you can do with OpManager is to register the Zebra MIB into OpManager. OpManager will then alert you when the Zebra's through a SNMP trap for events like paper jams, or out of paper events. We're planning on using this functionality to create a volunteer team of IT folks to assist our check-in volunteers.

[PMonkey]

It would seem you've never given SolarWinds Network Performance Manager Orion a try. It's superior to OpManager in many, many ways. Mostly, with much more flexible mapping and CustomMIB support.