Cisco FindIT Network Probe plan and deployment

[aniketalashe]

Hello Everyone,

We are having existing network infrastructure of 10 sites with 3-5 SG350 series switches in each location.

We were considering Cisco Find-IT Network manager and Find-IT Network probe for monitoring, backup and basic provisioning.

There was one query regarding the probe usage. The Cisco documentation states that we need one probe per site, and IP/SNMP reachability from the probe to each device in the site. However there is no clarity on what defines a "site".

If IP reachability is the only criteria, why cant we have a single centralised probe integrated with the network manager?

How many devices in total or "per site" can be managed using a probe?

Can the probes be setup in HA?

Thanks.

[David Harper]

Hi there,

A site is rather loosely defined as a network where all the devices are connected via LANs.  The reason for limiting the scope of the probe to only a single site is because the volume of traffic between the probe and the managed devices can get quite high and if the probe was managing remote sites then that traffic could start having a noticeable impact on the WAN connections.  In order to try and prevent this from happening, the probe will not discover across VPN tunnels.

You can find the scaling numbers in the FindIT documentation, but an individual probe will manage up to 50 network devices - switches, routers, and wireless access points - if it is a software probe hosted on a VM or Raspberry Pi, and 15 if it is hosted by a switch.

As for high availability, this is not something supported in the probe today.  The probe is essentially stateless as of version 2.0, and may be replaced or rebuilt with no significant data loss.

Cheers,

Dave.