SNMP and agent monitoring for a small MSP

[skotty]

Hello to you all,

We're a small MSP with only 3 employees. At the moment our focus is customers with smaller businesses with 1-20 employees.

I would like to start a Zabbix monitoring in the hope of identifying errors for our customers before they notice the errors themselves and would like some input from people who are hopefully more advanced than us .

We would like to monitor network equipment like routers, switches and accesspoints.
Also we would like to monitor servers and also a few desktops and laptops considering many of our customers don't have servers .
Here are some thoughts and questions to the forum.

• When the customer has a little bit bigger infrastructure with some servers and stuff we will run an agent on site. Should I use VPN for that agent to connect to our Zabbix server?
• If they only have a router and a laptop we would still like to monitor that router through SNMP. We won't run an agent at this customer but connect their router to our VPN-server and do SNMP monitoring that way.
  Is this the correct way of doing this or do you guys have better ideas perhaps?
  Many of our customers will have subnets in conflict with each other so I'm thinking I can use routes in the VPN-server for this. So I tell the VPN server that when you ask for info about 10.0.0.22 it's routed through the VPN to the customers router (192.168.1.1).

This is as far as I've come right now.

Do you have any more ideas for us I'm happy to recieve them .

/ Skotty

[vijayk]

Nice idea skotty.

For your 1st point you can configure zabbix proxy server at customer end and connect the proxy server to your zabbix server for minimize the internet traffic. Or yes, you can configure the agent over VPN or direct access via port forwarding.
For 2nd point, you can configure the SNMP with VPN or without VPN as above said with the help of port forwarding.

If you use port forwarding make sure you have configured the ACL to prevent the unwanted attacks.

[skotty]

Thanks for the input here vijayk. Really nice to know that I'm not all dumb :P.

He he he... I noticed my own mistake here.

Where I say agent, I mean Proxy .

Agents are for servers and clients, proxy is the middleman that could lower the band usage.