Monitoring a router

[David Dyer-Bennet]

On Tue, September 1, 2009 17:41, Jim Avery wrote:
> 2009/9/1 David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net>:
>> Is this "best practice" in the opinion of the community?  Or is using
>> SNMP
>> to monitor something inside the router better somehow?  And if so, WHAT?
>
>
> Good question.  One person's 'best practice' is another person's
> over-kill or under-kill.

Ain't it the truth!

And they're probably right for their actual situation, even.

> My golden rule is "only monitor something if you're going to be
> interested in it".

This seems to be getting back to Steinbach's Guildeline for Systems
Programming: never test for an error condition you don't know how to
handle.

> For routers this usually means I simply ping them,
> but often I'm interested in bandwidth of specific interfaces too so I
> make sure specific WAN links are monitored for bandwidth, errors,
> discards and so on using the plugins from http://www.manubulon.com

Another group is responsible for that level of network maintenance.  I
hope they're monitoring that sort of detail.

> It's often a good idea to have the router send you SNMP traps - you'll
> need to configure snmptt to handle them though, maybe using NagTrap.
> I often find I get more traps than I'm interested in though - which
> breaks the golden rule (see above) - so I then need either to filter
> the traps out in the snmptt config or prevent the router from sending
> them in the first place.

I probably can't get traps sent to me.  But, really, I only care about
routers in terms of what parts of the topology I can and can't reach, and
ping will tell me that.

> I used to monitor each router interface using ping, but now I think
> that's usually overkill.  It just depends ...

Right.  Thanks.

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info


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