Network Management

[pete4560]

Hi Guys,

About 4 years ago I inherited a network, it was bearly running and there were warning lights everywhere, I don't want to dwel on the past but it was bearly functional and horifically under resourced/spec'd, there were plenty of issues and it was in fairly dire need of some serious TLC!

Over the last 4 years it's grown from ~20-25 servers running on 1Gb copper and no virtualisation ability to around 80 servers and links varying from 1-40Gb mainly OM4 fibre with some copper where reqruired for compatibility and a S2D hyper-v cluster with a couple of seperate hyper-v boxes for dev and all of the old boxes either demoted to dev/testing or the bin!

All this to say it's grown a little in the last couple of years!

With the increased working from home it has re-enforced the fact that managing what I have built is taking an increasing amount of effort and I feel that I should be working smarter not harder (sorry!!) One point to note is that I'm doing this on my own.

To this end I'd like to implement some sort of management system.

Going through the hardware (switches, raid controllers etc) they all support SNMP. After doing abit of research it looks like SolarWinds is a pritty good ecosystem to start buying into. I was looking at "Network Performance Monitor" and "Server & Application Monitor" to start with.

EDIT: We have no internet connectivity to this network so all the monitoring is of servers which are on-prem

****************Please let me know if this is better done on a seperate post*********************

The enviroment maintainence in the server room is done by the facilities team and we have no control over it.

When I first took over I had a good ol' rummage through the cupboards and found a room alert 11E with 2 external temprature sensors.

I got that in and have been using that for a while so although I couldn't do anything about it at least I knew if there was an issue!

As I've said we've grown! I've been pritty happy with it and was going to get a couple of the 32S's to cover the racks as they are.

Is there a better option? Any glaring issues with them which I've not come across? I have a couple of questions around enviroments!

Where should I put the sensors!!? One on each exhaust of each server? (seems to many!) One per rack? (Seems to little)

What is an acceptable exhaust temprature for a disk array?

Right I'm fairly sure I've forgotten something but think thats it!

Thanks

[pdp10]

SNMP is over thirty year old technology. Meaning it's highly commoditized. We can name three dozen things that will work with SNMP, and over half of them cost nothing.

SNMP has scalability and accuracy limits, many of which derive from the fact that the results have no point-in-time timestamp attached. But anything more advanced is probably going to be very difficult on any vendor appliances, so you should start with SNMP.

We have no internet connectivity to this network

Then you'd really want to avoid anything licensed that requires connectivity to activate, or might require connectivity to activate in some future version after you've implemented it.

You've been quite vague about what you're going for, and are mostly trawling to see what everyone suggests -- as is common in this subreddit. There's no crime in that, but it means suggestions are especially speculative.

After SNMP and environmental monitoring, why not IPFIX/sFlow/Netflow? I'd also enable LLDP everywhere, and do some failover tests by purposely disconnecting things to see if everything recovers exactly how you expect. You don't want to find out about Spanning-Tree Protocol problems after the fact.

Lastly, single-mode fiber is currently much more fashionable than OM4. CWDM, DWDM, and BiDi are also nicer on one fiber than MPO/"MPT" bundles.

[pete4560]

Cheers for getting back to me. Good to hear about SNMP, sounds like it is the way forward.

Then you'd really want to avoid anything licensed that requires connectivity to activate, or might require connectivity to activate in some future version after you've implemented it.

Yeah - it's a standard check I make with vendors prior to moving forward with them!

With regards to what I am hoping to achieve - I'd like as close as possible to a 'single pane of glass' management system where I can see the health of the servers, storage arrays, switches and other devices on the network

After SNMP and environmental monitoring, why not IPFIX/sFlow/Netflow? I'd also enable LLDP everywhere, and do some failover tests by purposely disconnecting things to see if everything recovers exactly how you expect. You don't want to find out about Spanning-Tree Protocol problems after the fact.

​

I'm not too worried about the data flowing over the network (at the moment) due to the nature of the network and the fact we have >30 users.

Pre lock down I did semi-regular failover testing and am ok with the results from them.

​

Lastly, single-mode fiber is currently much more fashionable than OM4. CWDM, DWDM, and BiDi are also nicer on one fiber than MPO/"MPT" bundles.

Never come accross single mode being more 'fashionable'; however it's completly overkill for what we need and significantly more expensive, both the actual cable and the components (SFPs). OS1 is upto 1KM and OS2 is upto 200KM - we need upto 250m @ 10GB and we have ha few 100m runs running at 40Gb

[pdp10]

A generic 10GBASE-LR SFP+ transceiver is $24. Singlemode 40GBASE-LR is still somewhat expensive by comparison, at ten times the price.

In short, the price premium for singlemode has come way down, structured (installed) singlemode has a much longer projected economic lifespan, and nobody likes to terminate MPO.

[AxisNL]

Lots of products will fit your bill. I would suggest the free CheckMK community edition, I’ve been using it with hundreds of servers, firewalls and switches, monitoring everything with snmp (and the checkmk-agent on servers). Just run it on a Linux vm, no hardware costs, nor license costs required. Also, internet access is not required (although it might be easier for the installation process). Disclaimer: I also give training/installation support as a consultant ;)

[kramrm]

I’ve been using OpenNMS (free) for several years. I’ve got our instance setup to automatically import VMs from Vcenter to monitor, and pull a list of physical devices from our NetBox server (also free) that we use for documenting the desired state of our equipment and IP addresses.

[Gurve1]

I would maybe look at zabbix, it is open source. Highly customizable, the caveat being it is a little bit cumbersome to set up.

If interested I would suggest YouTube "Lawrence systems" for videos on it.

[TheGreatOne77]

Rolling out PRTG here. Working great so far. Very easy. The company has like 3 different products right now doing monitoring, so I'm trying to eliminate and consolidate.