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September 6, 2008 08:54pm pdt
 
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What are the "best practices" for configuring hosts to talk to Cisco MARS?

Tags: Cisco, CS-MARS
I'm new to the Cisco MARS appliance.  So far, I've got the appliance up and working.  Now I'm adding devices to monitor.

I know that there are a number of ways that MARS can monitor appliances, via SYSLOG, SNMP, and NetFlow.  My question is, what devices should be configured to communicate with MARS and through what method or combination of methods.

My fear is that if I start turning on all of these communications, the network will get flooded.

Should I monitor every switch and router?  Should I only monitor "core" network devices at each location?  Should I monitor every switch/router with SNMP but core equipement with SNMP/SysLog/NetFlow?

I want to set this up to collect the necessary information on our network to detect any problems without it causing other problems because the network is full of logging information to MARS.

In total, we have about 50+ sites and 200+ network devices.  Plus I'd like to monitor some Windows and UNIX hosts as well.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks.
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Question Stats
Zone: Networking
Question Asked By: bornskir
Solution Provided By: FaithShield
Participating Experts: 1
Solution Grade: A
Views: 0
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