HANDS-ON ACTIVITY 12A Monitoring Solar Winds Network One of the key tasks of network management is monitoring the network to make sure everything is running well. There are many effective network monitoring tools available, and several have demonstrations you can view on the Web. One of my favorites is solarwinds.net. They have a live demonstration of their network management software available at npm.solarwinds.net. Log in with the provided guest access. Figure 12-14 shows the top portion of the demo page. It shows a map of the network with circuits and locations color-coded. On the left side of the screen is a list of all nodes showing their status (green for good, yellow for some problems, and red for major problems), although the colors are hard to see in the figure. The bottom left part of the figure shows the busiest servers. The bottom right of this figure shows the nodes with problems so that a network manager can quickly see problems and act to fix them. For example, the sales switch is down. All Nodes - Tree View 3Com Adtran St.P-Adt 1224 St.P-Adt 1335 St.PAdt3448 Agile Storage, Inc. LAB_ONSTOR2660 American Power Conversion Corp. APC NetBotz Aruba Networks Inc Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. Cisco Compatible Systems Corp. Doll Computer Corporation External Extreme Networks +F5 Labs, Inc. FlowPoint Corporation Fore Systems, Inc. Foundry Networks, Inc. H3C HP +HUAWEI Technology Co.,Ltd IBM +Juniper Networks, Inc. Juniper Networks/NetScreen Linksys +Linux +Meru Networks Multi-Tech Systems, Inc. +Onet-snmp Network Appliance Corporation Northern Telecom Palo Alto Networks +Riverbed Samsung Group +Sun Microsystems Synoptics +OU.S. Robotics, Inc. Unknown +VMware Inc. + Windows ZYXEL Communications Corp. Top 10 Nodes by Average CPU Load NODE LAB-VCENTER51.lab.tex syd-2k3-live-01 Cur-3500 SYD-HYV-01 NPM SG9323P038 AVERAGE CPU LOAD 91% MANAGE NODES HELP 76% 63% 57 % 54% FIGURE 12-14 SolarWinds network management software, used with permission HELP Enterprise Network Map Exchange 2007 OWA Form Login US Network Phx SalesForce.com NODE Nodes with Problems Switch sales TUL-WDSRV-01 SUP Lab/ Samsung NP LEM-5.4.0-20120203 Review TEMP Temperature: HDD NP-LEM-v55-TEMP St.P-6509 SolarWinds Log & Event Manager-Jen&Hope H3C core-4204-03 Core-3640 Cisco-2106-West Cisco-2106-East Bru-Aruba200 SUA AUS Core UdpEcho Bastogne LATAM Office DESCRIPTION Node is Down. Node is Down. EU Locations Node is Down One or more Interfaces have state: Unknown. Node is Down One or more interfaces have state: Unknown. Node is Down One or more Interfaces have state: Unknown. Node is Down. Node is Up One or more Interfaces have state: Down. Node is Up One or more Interfaces have state: Down. Node is Up One or more Interfaces have state: Down. Node is Up One or more interfaces have state: Down. Node is Up One or more Interfaces have state: Down. Node is Up One or more Interfaces have state: Down. Node is Up One or more Interfaces have state: Down. Node is Up SQL Server 2005-2008 Performance (SQL) Tokyo Australia CURRENT RESPONSE TIME No Response No Response No Response No Response No Response No Response 38ms 33ms Oms 1ms Oms Oms HELP Oms SMTP HELP PERCENT LOSS 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% FIGURE 12-14 SolarWinds network management software, used with permission Figure 12-15 shows the next part of the page after I scrolled down. We now see two pie charts on the right side that show application health (which indicates that the software is an application management package as well as a network management package) and hardware health. You can click on any of the application or hardware categories to see which applications/hardware are in which status category. The table below these two pie charts shows the processes using the most memory, while the pie chart on the right shows the busiest circuits (top five conversations). You'll note that the software is also a configuration management package because below this pie chart there is a list of the last configuration changes.