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Bala
ManageEngine Password Manager Pro

Jingle bells are ringing on SIEM clouds!!

We have taken up support for Netflow logs on Firewall Analyzer, with more features on this bundle, probably a Christmas or a New year gift from Manage Engine shop.

For instance, a device's capability to throw Netflow packets were more restricted to devices like routers and switches. Cisco ASA v.8.2 firewall device has capability to throw Netflow packets along with syslogs. This is one of the mile stone achieved by Cisco.

Firewall Analyzer currently supports Syslogs for Cisco ASA device, and we intend to support Netflow logs from these ASA v.8.2 devices, very soon.

We are currently kick started our process to include log analysis for Netflow packets from Cisco ASA v.8.2 devices, apart from Syslog format support.

This being a top priority for us, we welcome your sample Netflow logs to include them in our test bed, and deliver solutions.

This feature enhancement along with a surprise bundle is planned to be premiered as a service pack over our current version,Firewall Analyzer .v.6.

Cisco ASA .v.8.2 users are requested to get in touch with our support for steps to be deployed on your device to generate sample logs, and  get upload links for sending us these sample logs.

Be rest assured, your logs are treated confidential, and used only to test and provide solutions.

Do get in touch with us, in case you need a quick sneak peak on our next feature pack. 

Hi Everyone,

Here is a step-by-step screenshot presentation on How to enable SNMP on Windows Servers. Hope you find this useful.

This is just a new initiative and more to follow from now…

If you are a beginner trying to understanding what is SNMP?  Then I’m sure you will find our SNMP Tutorial informative. Check the tutorial at "http://www.manageengine.com/products/opmanager/what-is-snmp.html"

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Kalvin

Team OpManager - The Network Monitoring Software from ManageEngine

Traffic analysis involves monitoring the network to find out who and what used the bandwidth and at what time. The analysis also involves having a detailed understanding on the network protocol distribution. One may ask why is there the need to identify the protocols in the network when you see the applications being used and their related conversations.

The protocol distribution helps network administrators find the bandwidth used by each protocol in the network. This helps find if any unwanted (read as: not mean to be used) protocols are being used in the network and based on this, the network administrator can reallocate this bandwidth to more critical applications using other protocols.

It also helps you determine if any inactive application protocol is being used in the network taking away valuable bandwidth. To give a real example, an administrator was expecting to see only negligible bandwidth usage by L2TP traffic in his network. He looked at the protocol distribution graph and what he found was L2TP occupying about 10% of the total traffic. Now, that is called sacrilege in network terminology !

Again, having a track on the network protocol distribution can even help quickly solve network problems. When the network is slow, instead of analyzing each application one by one, you can take a look at the protocol distribution to find if there is any unexpected change in the pattern and then analyze the protocol to find what application is involved in bandwidth.

And is it not much more easier to identify non compliance traffic based on protocol first and then drilling down to find the application and conversations involved rather than checking out for each applications in the list of thousands of applications?

Since Cisco and many of the major vendors in the market have already come up with NetFlow or a  similar flow format technology, one does not have to wonder how to obtain such an information from the routing or switching devices. All you need is configure your device to export NetFlow packets to ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer which supports almost all the major flow formats, and the product will capture the flow packets to generate the reports. Now that is called Up and Running in a matter of minutes.

It really does not do a big deal if you can just see the protocol distribution in the network. What you need is the ability to see the source and destination associated with each conversation corresponding to a protocol and this is exactly what NetFlow Analyzer can also do. Check out the screen shots to see protocol distribution reports available in NetFlow Analyzer.

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 At ManageEngine IT360, we always strive to ensure that the user must be able to perform complex tasks with little or minimal effort. In this post, I am going to talk about the three different operations you can perform in Dashboard page.

1. Generate different views of your IT business services
2. Create new business service
3. Create customized dashboards for various stakeholders

1. Generate Different Views of Your IT Business Services

ManageEngine IT360 offers four distinct views to view your IT business service(s). They are:

   1. Your traditional List View
   2. Tree View
   3. Plasma View and
   4. Global Business View

In your List View mode, you will be able to see the a bit more in-depth about the various business services that you have created. You will view the Availability, Health, Monitor Status, and Today's Availability (in % of uptime) of each business service created within IT360. By clicking on the health or availability icon, you can view the complete Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of the business service.

In Tree View mode, you can view entire list of business service sub-groups and its monitors. In this view, you can view the  availability and health of those monitors. It also displays the list of 'Uncategorized Monitors' which are being monitored through IT360 but not associated with any of the business services. 

With Plasma View mode, as the name suggests, you can display the entire list of monitors in a huge plasma screen. This view will contain the monitor's current status, major alarms created so far along with its business services health & availability.

And Global Business View displays the entire business services combined under a single business view. As before, you can host them in a large plasma screen for display.

2. Create New Business Services

3. Create Different Dashboards for various stakeholders

To create a new dashboard click on any of the 'Add' link to create a Network,Server & Applications or Traffic dashboards.

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and try these options :-)

Quite often we get this query from our evaluators and customers. We already have this data exposed in the OpManager knowledgebase; however I thought it would be nice to do a blog on it as well.

To analyze bandwidth consumption, we ran OpManager in an isolated environment and monitored the devices as listed below

1. 100 Servers (includes service monitoring like Web, MySQL, FTP, SMTP, HTTPS)
2. 3 Switches (each had 24 Ports).
3. 3 Routers (each had 5 Interfaces).
4. 2 Firewalls (each had 3 interfaces).
5. 2 Printers

Servers are monitored through WMI with default monitors (CPU, Memory & Disk) associated.

Monitors like CPU, Memory and Interfaces Rx & Tx Traffic/ Utilization/ Errors/ Discards are associated to Network Devices (like Switches, Routers, Printers and Firewalls) by default.

Monitoring Interval is set to 1 minute for all monitors and the status polling is also set to 1 minute.

Here is the report for you...

UDP Traffic: 5225 bps

TCP/ WMI Traffic: 39435 bps

ICMP Traffic: 1980 bps (18 bps per device)

So, OpManager generates a total traffic of approximately 47Kbps within the LAN in order to monitor 100 Servers, 3 Routers, 3 Switches, 2 Firewalls and 2 Printers.

Hope you find this information useful. 

One more info…Recently, we brought out a new SNMP tutorial for beginners.  Do check out the animated gifs to explain SNMP communication for various commands like GET, TRAP and INFORM.

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Kalvin

Team OpManager- The Network Monitoring Software from ManageEngine

The Drudgery of Deploying Enterprise Solution

Customer satisfaction through innovation is a way of life in ManageEngine. Normally, deployment of log management (SIEM) solutions of top brands are not so simple. You require a number of files to be downloaded. Innumerable installations, configurations, and tuning etc., to start the deployed application. Often times, without the assistance of consultants it will be impossible to deploy a enterprise solution. To start running the solution and get the desired output, will be a tough task. For IT managers/administrators, deploying any enterprise solution will surely give few sleepless nights.

Escape from the Drudgery!

Embrace  ManageEngine!!

ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer deployment for enterprises is a child's play.

1 - 2 - 3

Deployment in three steps.

#1

Download, install Distributed edition as Admin server in your central office/head quarters. (very few install time configurations).

Run the application.

#2

Send the downloaded file or send the application download link (same file doubles as Admin and Collector server. How Simple!!) and the Admin server details to the geographically remote location (your branch/sub office). Get it installed as Collector server in the remote location (here again, very few install time configurations). Get the Firewalls configured to monitor.

Run the application.

Replicate this step in all remote locations.

#3

Wait for 10 minutes.

Open Admin client UI in a browser. The reports of Firewalls in different parts of the world are there. Check it out.

The Solution: Firewall Analyzer 6 Distributed Edition

The procedure may not take more than an hour, staring from download to report roll out.

No cumbersome downloads. No consultant required. No training required. Minimal configurations. Global deployment can't get any simpler.

Scalability and feature set exceeds any other enterprise SIEM solution. Distributed monitoring very few have.

Experience it to believe it. Try Firewall Analyzer 6 Distributed Edition.

When a server goes down or when the response time of a database query exceeds the normal query execution time, any monitoring system in place should perform two actions. One to generate an alarm with relevant information (preferably the RCA - Root Cause Analysis) and secondly to log a ticket into a Service Desk solution. It may additionally execute an SMS action to notify the right technician.

With IT360, you can do that without any external interference. IT360 allows you to automate these actions thereby reducing time taken to troubleshoot the issue. In today's post, we will see how to create threshold, assign action and configure alarms so that the action is properly executed.

Creating Thresholds

3. Click on 'Associate' opposite to 'Response Time'. This will open a pop-up configuration window, wherein you can select the correct threshold corresponding to response time. 

4. Click on 'Save' and 'Close' button to save and close the configuration window. You will now find that the response time for the Apache server is now configured and ready for associating an action.

Create Ticket Action

1. Provide a proper name for the ticket.

2. Select the correct Category, Sub Category, Item, Priority, Group and Technician who will be responsible for this web server.

3. IT360 also allows you to insert relevant details into the Ticket content. This enables the technician to view relevant information. This allows the technician to troubleshoot the performance issue quickly.

4. Click on 'Log a Ticket' button to complete the process.

Additionally, you can also execute this action manually by clicking on thisicon. You can also update ticket's content, change category, sub category, etc by clicking on the edit  icon.

Assign Ticket Action

Select the appropriate action that needs to be associated with this threshold value. You can create actions and enable them in such a way that you can get alerted when there is an issue, or when the issue clears or when the issue is going to get critical. Once you have chosen the action and clicked the 'Save' & 'Close' button, the configuration is done. The next time when the response time threshold value is breached, the technician is automatically notified. A ticket is logged into the Service Desk solution. In addition to this, you can also associate an SMS action to this threshold thus ensuring the technician receives the information as soon as the incident occurs.

Similarly, you can create an ad-hoc action by clicking on 'New Action' link inside the configuration pop-up window. It will allow you to create the following actions as displayed in the screenshot below.