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

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

We found something interesting with our network monitoring software - OpManager. Last week one of my colleagues, who was working on a customer's issue found that SNMP requests sent from ManageEngine products did not get any responses. We did all the basic steps - verifying whether SNMP is enabled on the devices, SNMP credentials etc. - and found everything was perfect. We then tried to send SNMP requests from our MIB browser, a SNMP troubleshooting tool, but no luck. The customer had a MIB Browser from another vendor and we tried sending the SNMP requests from that MIB browser and we got the response from the device.  After spending sometime on the issue, we found the SNMP requests sent from OpManager were getting dropped at the server itself (failed to reach the devices).

That reminded us of the few issues we had with the firewall and anitivirus. We checked the firewall and antivirus on the server. Firewall was disabled, but Symantec antivirus was running. Once we stopped the antivirus, we could receive responses from the devices for the SNMP requests sent from OpManager server. We were bewildered, at the same time very eager to know about why SNMP requests sent from ManageEngine applications are blocked, when the same from the other MIB browser could pass through. We analyzed both the MIB Browsers in-depth. The difference was the platform that they were built on. Our's were built on Java, while the other one was built on .Net. We did some quick research and found that antiviruses block SNMP requests when sent from Java based applications.

Have you folks come across the same? Feel free to share your experiences and thoughts.

This is the second time we had an issue with antivirus. The first one was with McAfee. It didn't allow MySQL of OpManager 8 to start. We did some changes in the McAfee policies to get it working. Please check this link if you haven't checked it before. If you face any such issues, try disabling the firewall and anti-virus during startup which should work.

Pravin

Quite a few cases of outages in the recent past: the Gmail outage caused by overloaded servers, Microsoft Sidekick’s data loss from a faulty server upgrade, Twitter’s DoS attacks etc.. Most of these cases could’ve been prevented if a more cautious approach was taken, the top guy considering all chances of failure and setting up backup facilities just in case something does go wrong. But then one can never be 100% disaster-proof.

It is times like these that IT teams truly appreciate a network fault management system having an integrated helpdesk:

• Quick access to device configuration records & knowledge base
• Automatic creation and assigning of trouble-tickets
  
• Immediate information on affected business services etc.

“I used a lot of products in the past but I don’t remember a product that was as useful as ServiceDesk Plus to administer all the problems that I have in my network and also the OpManager.. Sometimes when I have a server that’s unavailable, I can act before a user lets me know that I had a problem.” Jesse Gusmao Ferreira, from Hospital Samaritano, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

How many of you have known it the minute your network monitor loses network connectivity? Or worse, how many of you knew through end user complaints (I’m sure in no mild words!)?

OpManager now sends an SMS to your mobile phone when the hosting server loses network connectivity. You also get an SMS alert when the OpManager server regains connectivity. Set-up is very simple - just key in your mobile number when configuring the SMS server in the Admin tab. Here's the list of supported modems for SMS notifications.



SMS on losing connectivity: “OpManager has detected that it has lost network connectivity and has suspended all monitoring. Monitoring will be automatically resumed once connectivity is established.”

SMS on re-establishing connectivity: “Network connectivity reestablished. Restarting Network monitoring services”

PS: You can also have two OpManager installations set-up in a fail-over configuration to ensure an always-monitored network environment. Check out OpManager's Network Monitoring Failover and Failback