Re: Basic Network Monitor

Mike,
MOM is the microsoft operations manager server. If I might digress for a
moment, one of the components that is often looked for in a monitoring
solution is status aggregation (or drill down). This allows the user to have
a high level diagram (such as a map of the u.s.) to show multiple sites,
that can drill down to a site view, that can drill down to a rack view. The
demo shown at the Office2007 launch demonstrated using v2007 to show the
status information and how an indvidual nodes status could be "percolated"
through the different levels of detailing.
Like I mentioned in a previous post, at a macro level these types of
challanges have the two parts of gathering the status information and
displaying it. MOM would satisfy the status gathering. In my particular
scenario I have a third portion which is site discovery which adds another
interesting challange because I have to create the drawing dynamically.
al
"Mike Smith" <MikeSmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:5F76C298-B9AF-4681-9D58-90C6D86B3247@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sorry Al, what is "MOM"?

"Al Edlund" wrote:

saw a demo of tying v2007 to MOM that looked interesting,
al

"Al Edlund" <edlund@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uN%23LKYRSHHA.996@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mike,
As Mark mentions, 2007 has the functionality to link to a data source.
The
real challange here is to have an application that can gather what you
want to monitor and not put your network/components into meltdown. The
standard products out there (HP, Tivoli, CA, etc.) have a lot of
safeguards under the covers to protect users from themselves and are
usually run on dedicated servers so that they don't impact production
applications. This stability comes at a cost. The standard consulting
response is usually "clients want three aspects in a solution "good,
cheap, and pretty; unfortunately you only get two out of three". Visio
is
pretty, now as a manager you must make the decision on the other two.
If you don't want to develop one of your own, look for something that
can
gather the information you want and stores it in a data store that can
be
queried.
Al
"Mike Smith" <Mike Smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:46D384B0-9B74-448A-BBDA-BE260E680915@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Visio provides a wonderful environment for me as an IT Manager to
inventory
the infrastructure I am responsible for. My diagrams have grown over
the
years and include a whole lot of "dumb" items (notes on cable runs;
mini-hubs: etc) as well as inteligent devices (Cisco routers &
switches;
servers; etc). Because of the effort I've put into this product it
has
become one of my primary management tools.

What I'm after now is to take it to the next level and provide dynamic
status of some (not all) of these elements. I need to indicate if a
link
is
up by showing a distant device is alive or not through color (red for
down;
green for up). This is pretty basic stuff and I have seen in these
forums
some discussions involving scripting, however, I don't have a
knowledge
of
scripting and don't have the budget to hire somebody to build and
maintain a
solution like this.

I've looked at some other products but they are either way too
complicated
or are pitched at mapping rather than monitoring. I think for my
requirements basic ping with some services/ports monitoring would be
more
than sufficient. Alerting would be nice but historical analysis isn't
a
requirement. The reason for this is that in a small to medium
enterprise
my
SLAs are based on "is it up?" not "how often is it down?". Al I need
to
know
is what are my current issues so I can see what needs to be resolved.

If there is a commercial product out there or an add-on then please
inform
us in this forum. Otherwise please seriously consider including such
a
basic
addition to the Visio network functions.

regards, Mike Smith

smith@xxxxxxxxxxxx

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