Switch Management/Monitoring

[lmrogers]

Afternoon,

 

I'm just wondering what if any people are using to monitor and manage their switching infrastructure? Are there any central management tools people use, anything that does things like configuration backups, firmware updates? Remote management?

 

Cheers

[slugshead]

IMC for our Aruba network. Appears to do a bit more than Aruba central, but a less pretty interface

[MatthewL]

We use PRTG.

 

Can monitor if they are on or offline, plus port monitors shows if ports haven't been used in x period of days, probably not so much of an issue in schools but we can identify when our engineers haven't unpatched and the switch is full we can guide them in what can be safely unpatched.

 

Monitors traffic and by port too.

[lmrogers]

IMC for our Aruba network. Appears to do a bit more than Aruba central, but a less pretty interface

 

How does IMC work? Is it a cloud based solution that gives a whole overview of the Aruba devices?

[slugshead]

How does IMC work? Is it a cloud based solution that gives a whole overview of the Aruba devices?

 

It's an on prem installation. There's dashboards you can customise so display whatever info is available. Bandwidth use, mem use, network diagram, up/down monitor

 

You can even manage your switches through it, roll out new VLANs, change interface properties, enable/disable ports etc...

 

You just import the MIB files for the aruba switches and add the switches and off you go.

 

It's a huge package, but as usual the HPE website doesn't sell it very well

[dmj]

It's been a while since I worked with network switch/routers, but when I did I used Ansible. Ansible is a configuration management tool for Windows/linux/mac and network equipment. It's opensource. Theres some info about network automation here: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/network/index.html#network-guide

 

There is a specific aruba role that has been developed by HP here: https://github.com/aruba/aoscx-ansible-role

[lmrogers]

I've got a demo/call with Auvik today to look at what they offer. I like the fact that it is cloud manageable and the interface seems pretty nice and easy. Does anyone know how it compares to the IMC or the open source alternatives?

[CHiLL]

I was thinking about internal network monitoring only last week. I think Spiceworks once had a free network monitor tool that used SNMP to get stats of compatible equipment, with a live/graph view and could send email alerts. But that was quite a number of years ago ago and I think they discontinued it. I don't know of any other free ones, so I'm interested to see what's recommended.

IMC for our Aruba network. Appears to do a bit more than Aruba central, but a less pretty interface

IMC used to be free many years ago for smaller sites, though I believe it's now a paid solution?

[jnfarmer]

PRTG is free up to 100 sensors.

[Jamman960]

I'm currently evaluating ManageEngine OpManager, its working really well so far and includes pretty much everything I'd want inc event log, syslog monitoring - currently have it setup to alert me when a user gets locked out, it was a bit daunting at first but having labelled all of our switch ports its giving some useful information.

 

Its not too expensive although I'm awaiting a final quote.

[Aprice]

For monitoring I've started with Zabbix, however was a little disappointed with the lack of detail I got off our Aruba 2930M's. However I suspect it just needs a different SNMP library for it.

 

I'm sure putting some more time into it will lead to something a little better.

 

Management wise just the CLI and a backup script that copies the configs of the stacks nightly.

 

Alex

[MatthewL]

ManageEngine products are great, I want to go down the route of using OpManager to manage the switches in the long run. We use many of their other products so makes far more sense.