SNMP Based monitoring is the starting point of an IT Service Management initiative
Polling data from critical devices has always been the basis for any IT monitoring system: it is the starting point for any monitoring systems. These platforms always provide a global view of all the critical devices in your IT system to control their availability and level of resource consumption.
Most traditional monitoring systems whether commercial software (e.g. BMC Patrol, HP IMC, ManageEngine OpsManager, Solarwinds NPM, Ipswitch What’s Up Gold, CastleRock SNMPc, CA Nimsoft) or open source (Nagios, Centreon, Cacti etc…) rely on a set of methods to control the health of the most critical IT devices:
- SNMP is widely used protocol which enables monitoring solutions to access health indicators of various devices (routers, switches, servers, security devices, etc…) and proactively detect any loss of availability or lack of resources (processor, memory, queues, etc…). The polling is done on a regular basis, often every 5 minutes.
- Active checks: monitoring also relies on active checks which controls the availability of the device and some form of response time (e.g. download of an HTTP page, ICMP request “Ping”, etc…)
- WMI is a protocol to retrieve management information from Microsoft systems
- RMON & Netflow: these protocols enables monitoring platform get a simplified view of the traffic flowing through the interfaces of critical network devices (routers, switches).
SNMP based monitoring is a mandatory step for an IT department, as it gives the IT department a global view of the availability of all critical devices and makes it possible to proactively identify a resource shortage. SNMP based monitoring should be the very first thing setup when trying to implement an IT Service Management process.
Understanding and the limits of device based monitoring
Although monitoring the availability and health status is an obligation for every IT organization, it does not provide a full answer to the questions raised by running a complex IT systems which supports business critical processes.
There are intrinsic limits to SNMP monitoring:
- Device polling: polling a device every 5 minutes and making sure that this device is up and running and good health is useful thing; nevertheless, many things may occur within each 5 minute interval: resource outage like a RAM outage, a reboot, the restart of a service, … these events will rarely be reported by SNMP based monitoring.
- Active checks: they are great, but they give an indication of performance only for the element they have checked: for example, a response to a PING does not mean that all the services on the system are running and a response to an HTTP page request for www.company.com/index.html in less than 500ms does not mean that all the pages browsed by actual users will have such a short response time.
Indeed the biggest limit is that even if all devices in an application delivery chain are available and have sufficient resources (CPU, RAM, etc…) does not mean all users are experiencing proper end user response times!
What value N/APM can add?
Network and Application Performance Monitoring consists in capturing all end user transactions running on the network and build a performance history to:
- Show how the network is used and what is the performance for every flow
- Quickly identify end user performance degradations on all applications (understanding when, the degradation occurs, which users & servers are impacted, what is the origin of the degradation –network, server processing, data transfer)
- Understand which application transactions are slow or generate errors (which HTTP pages / objects, which SQL queries, etc…)
- Drive performance optimization by providing all IT departments with unquestionable objective data about the delivery of applications through the network.
How the combination of SNMP based monitoring and N/APM can be a revolution for your IT Performance
Cumulating the capabilities of both SNMP Monitoring and Network & Application Performance Management gives your IT team a single pane of glass on the status and performance of your IT systems: from the performance of all critical applications to the availability, health and performance of each critical device.
With this solution, you are prepared to resolve any outage or degradation in a matter of minutes, the different IT groups can rely on trustworthy information to analyze past outage and to optimize their system, so that there is no more outage or degradation in the future.
Testimonial
About IBO Solutions
IBO Solutions is an IT consultancy firm specialized in IT Service Management based in Luxemburg. They provide implementation, consulting and operational follow-up services to a variety of customers. IBO Solutions’ team has a strong background in the deployment, operations and management of SNMP-based solutions such as Solarwinds NPM andManageEngine OpsManager .
Why the combination of SNMP and Agentless APM is a must have for a comprehensive ITSM offering
Radu Odobescu, Founder and Managing Director at IBO Solutions explains how Performance Vision complemented IBO Solutions’ monitoring solution portfolio: “When it comes to providing tools to implement ITSM processes in an organiza
tion, SNMP monitoring is probably mandatory and the first step every organization should take. This is why IBO Solutions’ focus has historically been to focus on offering the right solution to a large variety of end users; we delivered a variety of SNMP-based solutions to our customers (Solarwinds NPM, ManageEngine OpsManager and ScienceLogic) along with some services to help customers configure and manage these solutions through time. Afterwards, we have realized that there was one pain point that none of the SNMP monitoring solution could address: when IT is receiving complaints about poor network or application performance, there is no way you can track what happened based on the data collected through SNMP. With the growing complexity of IT Systems and the increased dependency of business operations on applications, this need has become crucial to a lot of our customers.
tion, SNMP monitoring is probably mandatory and the first step every organization should take. This is why IBO Solutions’ focus has historically been to focus on offering the right solution to a large variety of end users; we delivered a variety of SNMP-based solutions to our customers (Solarwinds NPM, ManageEngine OpsManager and ScienceLogic) along with some services to help customers configure and manage these solutions through time. Afterwards, we have realized that there was one pain point that none of the SNMP monitoring solution could address: when IT is receiving complaints about poor network or application performance, there is no way you can track what happened based on the data collected through SNMP. With the growing complexity of IT Systems and the increased dependency of business operations on applications, this need has become crucial to a lot of our customers.
We looked for a Network-based APM solution which would be suitable for our SNMP monitoring customers: we took a close look at the market to identify a solution which would be powerful enough to address the Application performance challenge faced by our customers. In this respect, we paid a specific attention to their capability to troubleshoot application performance at layer 7 and to integrate with virtualized datacenters. We also required a solution which would be easy to integrate with NPM and OpsManager and suitable for the cost and resource constraints of our customers. We finally picked Performance Vision for their powerful APM capabilities and the ease of use which fitted the requirements of our customers!
After more than 2 years of collaboration, more than 20 of our SNMP customers are now also Performance Vision customers and we are particularly pleased with this success!”
