Looking for advice for monitoring our network devices. Our network team likes PRTG and we like SCOM for monitoring servers. Management would like a single pane of glass. to look at so we are each looking at each others technologies. What have others found both good and bad for monitoring Cisco network devices with SCOM 2016? I have also been ask to come up with a pro and con sheet for each product. We have each had some good things to say about each product PRTG is very easy to set up and configure but does not give me the level of monitoring that I need for troubleshooting. SCOM with Squared UP in front of it give me more powerful dashboards that non technical people see and understand.
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We’ve tested monitoring of Cisco and HP for about 3/4 year win SCOM 2012 R2.
Finally we decided to split again. Networkers are using now SolarWinds and are happy.
From SCOM-User perspective:
- SCOM has a step learning curve, even if you just monitor network devices you need to understand discoveries, monitors, rules and overrides. Perhaps you also need to know how the alerting (channel, subscription, subscriber) works.
- It might be difficult to accept that ‘adding a network’ device and getting it monitored might take an hour.
- We had to add additional scripts to reflect the expected names (https://www.vroege.biz/?p=746)
From SCOM-Admin perspective:
– If you keep the Management Packs un-tuned you will need TBs for the DateWare House. State-Changes of network interfaces can easily fill tables.
– After tuning growing stops but the performance wasn’t good. – We prepared ‘views’ to show all network devices in a location or devided them via type. Just opening took about 1,5 minutes.
Finally
We also liked the idea of having one view so I created a small MP which queries the SolarWinds Monitoring Server and integrates it into SCOM.
You can find it here:
https://github.com/Juanito99/SolarWinds_NPM_OpsMgr
Hope this helps.
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[This is just some hopefully helpful info, rather than an answer, hence posting it as a comment]
If PRTG and SCOM are both in the picture it may be helpful to know that, firstly, PRTG support embedding in an iFrame, so you could use the Web Content Tile in Squared Up to bring views into Squared Up from PRTG that way - https://kb.paessler.com/en/topic/503-how-can-i-use-graphs-from-prtg-in-other-web-pages
Secondly, I think their API does something pretty cool, in that it can return data as SVG, meaning you could use the WebAPI Tile in Squared Up to pull in SVG based views from PRTG
You can use the Web Content tile with a URL something like this: http://prtginstance/chart.svg?type=graph&width=300&height=160&graphid=2&id=0&user=prtgadmin&password=prtgadmin
Since it returns an SVG, it should scale nicely to fit the tile height in Squared Up
For additional reading on the WebAPI Tile, I’d suggest starting here - https://support.squaredup.com/v3/Walkthroughs/Tiles/HowToUseTheWebAPITile