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Solar winds IP monitor and network device monitor

I am tring to get more than just up and down time on the hosts. For instance I have cisco switch that I would like to monitor. how do i setup each side for this because I have never done it before

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Kamran Arshad

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mikebernhardt

You should also check out Dude. Odd name, but here's the link:
http://www.mikrotik.com/thedude.php

mikebernhardt

BTW, Dude is free.

jonnydollar

ASKER

But the our office already has the software for one, and two the demo at the vendor site shows it has the ability to monitor things like hard drive space, ram, temp etc in addition to up down of the host itself.

http://www.solarwinds.com/products/ipmonitor/

Kamran Arshad

You may check out the comparison of Orion and IP Monitor;

http://www.solarwinds.com/products/ipmonitor/comparison.aspx?orion=true

mikebernhardt

Just to answer your original question-- anthing that does the kind of monitoring you are talking about uses snmp. On your switch, you configure a snmp community string like this
snmp community expert ro

Where "expert" is the string and ro means "read-only." This means software can poll but not make changes. A read-write string (rw) will let anyone using snmp actually change your configuration, which requires control for obvious reasons.

So on the software side, you tell it the address of the device, give it the read-only string expert, and it will poll for whatever you ask.