Monitoring an Internet Link

[chivasregal]

Hi, We are using Zabbix to monitor a few internet links so we can be notified if the connection goes down.

All the links are connected to Firewalls and we have a simple trigger setup to check/monitor the port (that the internet is connected too on the FW) and if no data is received within a period of time (60secs or whatever) then trigger the link is down.

Example:
{host:ifOutOctets[PortB].nodata(105)}=1

This works perfect, except because we are monitoring these devices over the internet we must be experiencing latency and lag at times (maybe even packet loss, however i believe its more latency issues) which is causing the triggers to activate randomly through the day giving us bunch of false positives. Sometimes, hundreds of them through out the day.

Is there a better way to do what I am trying to achieve here? PING is usually disabled on such devices, so this wont work either - and to be honest, i dont want to be pinging multiple devices 24x7.

Thanks
JK

[Linwood]

It was at a prior life and I don't have the code anymore, but what I did that worked nicely was to set up a SLA monitor on a router at each site (this worked on Cisco, so depends on what you have). This did something like pinging a few hops out, or google, or your outside DNS -- whatever you want to use as a test.

The SLA would then fire when that failed, and all that polling is done in the router itself. The SLA can then be tested by a snmp poll or by a snmp trap, if I recall.

The nice thing about doing it like this is it doesn't resume an outage is going to affect the actual interface or the local connection point, it tests connectivity and even response not just that the first couple devices are all working.