Basic Network Monitor

[Mike Smith]

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

(e-mail address removed)

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[Mark Nelson [MS]]

Take a look at this post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/visio/archive/2006/12/01/microsoft-office-visio-2007-released.aspx

Visio 2007 has the ability to dynamically change the diagram in the ways you
describe. To make it work, you need a database or Excel spreadsheet to pull
refreshable data from. You need some tool to scan the status of your
network and push the information into a database. Then Visio can go from
there.

--
Mark Nelson
Office Graphics - Visio
Microsoft Corporation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Al Edlund]

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

 

[Al Edlund]

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

 

[Mike Smith]

Sorry Al, what is "MOM"?

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

 

[Al Edlund]

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