Customer Network Operations Monitoring

Curiosityx · 22 Sep 2008 at 17:58

Greetings, we currently use a variety of in house windows based tools for diagnosing network related issues with customer networks.

We are in the position at the moment to put in place a more robust solution to monitor Cisco voice, wireless, security, routing and switching products using such methods as SNMP and netflow. We have already chosen a product for monitoring voice quality now were after a network monitoring product.

At present we are looking to monitor upwards of 250 customer sites ranging from 5 - 100 devices per site.

Ive looked at Ciscoworks LMS which i feel may be beyond our needs as it tends to be targeted at enterprise level and Monitor Manager/Director which from running on our internal network doesn't give enough level of granularity.

Im considering looking into Solarwinds as ive used there engineer tools for many years but never products such as Orion.

In essence what we would want is a hierarchical approach with option to install a monitoring appliance at the local customer site and report back to a central collector. It would be nice to have a flexible option of forming a vpn relationship with the customer site and providing remote site monitoring without having install a local appliance.

Any vendor suggestions would be welcome.

Regards

Chief Wiggum · 22 Sep 2008 at 18:31

We're investing into CiscoWorks here, but that's at a enterprise level, more locally we've spent some time using Nagios and one of the guys has spent ages developing it, to suit our needs...
If you've got someone with the skills to do this, it's worth a go as you can segment everything down with custom views....

BoomAM · 22 Sep 2008 at 18:36

I know a few LEAs administer their entire infrastructure network/s with Solerwinds....

Ev0 · 22 Sep 2008 at 18:38

BoomAM said:
I know a few LEAs administer their entire infrastructure network/s with Solerwinds....

I know the company who look after our network use this.

Curiosityx · 22 Sep 2008 at 21:34

Chief Wiggum said:
We're investing into CiscoWorks here, but that's at a enterprise level, more locally we've spent some time using Nagios and one of the guys has spent ages developing it, to suit our needs...
If you've got someone with the skills to do this, it's worth a go as you can segment everything down with custom views....

I agree Nagios is an impressive product specially considering it's open source but unfortunately i would very much like a boxed solution, i just wouldnt have the time.

Cost isnt too much of an issue, were looking at a celing of arround £25k.

Chief Wiggum · 23 Sep 2008 at 07:46

well, 25k should buy you a good solution

Though you could buy a developer in and spend that customising Nagios and writing all your doc's

Out of interest, what solution are you using for voice? We're dropping in a module for CiscoWorks with probes that sit on the network. While this is fine for monitoring our corperate IPT, it's not suitable for our other IP voice solution...

sidethink · 23 Sep 2008 at 07:56

Using Ciscoworks LMS here historically for around 6000 devices. Its quite nice but is very expensive.

We also have a 10000 node license for Orion and I must say its very impressive but because we only have such a small license (when compared to the number of nodes in the estate) we only use it for in depth monitoring of problem sites. Orion is licensed by node (each port, uplink etc being a node), 10000 licenses doesnt go that far.