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Monitoring |
Features
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ViewITpro provides comprehensive monitoring of network devices such as routers, hubs, switches, and firewalls. ViewITpro delivers the most powerful monitoring capability available, providing the ability to monitor any metric and anything the target device can report. There are a total of six possible ways ViewITpro monitors your network devices: Level 1: Device Availability Accomplishes the most basic monitoring metric: is the target device Up or Down? Like most monitoring products, ViewITpro uses ICMP "ping" to detect device availability as its first test. ViewITpro can also detect device availability using several other tests which are detailed in the later levels.
Level
2: Application Monitoring: Servers and network devices in today’s TCP/IP-based networks communicate on specific TCP or UDP ports. The systems may be up and running but specific ports may not communicate properly due to application faults, firewalls, hardware, or other network problems. Monitoring specific ports provides a powerful tool for monitoring application communications and availability across your network.
Level 3: SNMP polling Most network devices and servers are instrumented with Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) capabilities. This is a standard mechanism used to report performance object data and management information to a Network Management System (NMS). ViewITpro is a full-featured NMS that provides standard SNMP polling and statistical reporting out-of-the-box. Most network management vendors claim to be SNMP-capable. What they don’t make known is that what they really offer is simple SNMP GET requests which ask a network device to return the current value of a specific object identifier (OID) such as "packets IN." This simplistic polling typically yields meaningless data such as packets in = 5,992. What can be done with this information? Nothing, of course. ViewITpro assembles appropriate OID values into meaningful statistics such as "Bandwidth Utilization." Most vendors won’t be honest and explain their SNMP limitations accurately. The statistic Bandwidth Utilization is not a single OID object, as many vendors will have one believe. The actual statistic is created by using the formula: ((IN pkts in Octets + OUT pkts in Octets) * 8) /1024. There are two OIDs with appropriate mathematics built-in.
Level 4: SNMP trap processing ViewITpro processes and interprets SNMP "traps" sent by devices and can be custom configured to monitor and poll virtually any SNMP capable device for RMON and MIB2 data objects. Processing and interpreting SNMP traps means taking raw traps, which are typically cryptic, and converting them into useful, actionable events. Level 5: Syslog Monitoring Most intelligent devices implement a standard log file, typically called "syslog" where important health and hardware information is logged during normal operation. ViewITpro inspects these logs in real time and detects best-practices based patterns as well as generic errors to provide advanced proactive warning of problems. Syslog monitoring is implemented for all major networking vendors.
Level 6: Network Protocol Analysis X-ray
vision for networks. As a value-added option, the ViewITpro
NMS can be shipped with a built-in "sniffer".
This functionality enables the user to identify the "top talkers"
and visualize the bandwidth allocation for each protocol (application) riding
on the network. Further, the reporting capability enables the user to view
true bandwidth utilization statistics that are valuable in enforcing
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Monitoring
