We need to monitor a very wide variety of network equipment at hundreds of locations totaling thousands of devices and many thousands of switchports. This equipment could be Cisco Catalysts switches, or equivalent, at one location, Juniper firewalls at others, and lower end devices at others. Maybe even some home office users with a firewall and a VOIP phone that we just want to monitor the bandwidth so we can explain events that occur.
We currently use an expensive monitoring solution for the various Windows servers, workstations, etc but we don't have the insight I would like into all the switches at these locations. We run Cacti which provides bandwidth monitoring, etc for the different internet connections but I am interested in switchport level monitoring and threshold alerts.
We do not have VPNs to all sites which made proxy a perfect fit.
While some monitoring solutions you just point it to the IP of a device and it pulls interface descriptions, etc from switchports (like Cacti), it looks like to have interface descriptions that ZABBIX may require us not only to define which switchports we want to monitor, but to build Templates for each and every device we wish to monitor. For the various 48 port switches, plus all of the other equipment, this appears to be a massive labor cost.
Am I understanding this correctly? I see that the mentality is to monitor only what you need but our business does not want to wait until after an incident to setup monitoring. We want to have the data to investigate the first incident. I like everything that I read about ZABBIX and from my own testing with 1.8 and 2.0 but I'll have to build a case around the amount of time that it would take to create all of the templates, devices, items, triggers, and graphs for the many thousand switchports we wish to monitor.
I think the real question is: Would ZABBIX be the right fit for this need?
Would there be a different product more suited to our need?
Thanks!
We currently use an expensive monitoring solution for the various Windows servers, workstations, etc but we don't have the insight I would like into all the switches at these locations. We run Cacti which provides bandwidth monitoring, etc for the different internet connections but I am interested in switchport level monitoring and threshold alerts.
We do not have VPNs to all sites which made proxy a perfect fit.
While some monitoring solutions you just point it to the IP of a device and it pulls interface descriptions, etc from switchports (like Cacti), it looks like to have interface descriptions that ZABBIX may require us not only to define which switchports we want to monitor, but to build Templates for each and every device we wish to monitor. For the various 48 port switches, plus all of the other equipment, this appears to be a massive labor cost.
Am I understanding this correctly? I see that the mentality is to monitor only what you need but our business does not want to wait until after an incident to setup monitoring. We want to have the data to investigate the first incident. I like everything that I read about ZABBIX and from my own testing with 1.8 and 2.0 but I'll have to build a case around the amount of time that it would take to create all of the templates, devices, items, triggers, and graphs for the many thousand switchports we wish to monitor.
I think the real question is: Would ZABBIX be the right fit for this need?
Would there be a different product more suited to our need?
Thanks!
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