Cisco Security Manager Advice

[Patrick McHenry]

Hi,

I'm looking into Cisco Security Manager. From what I understand you can monitor and manage Cisco security appliances. I'm interested in the monitoring of our Cisco ASAs - specifically, monitoring VPN sessions and their  trending over months at a time and I would like to monitor other Cisco devices on the network for link problems/performance and such - I don't want to use Cisco Security Manager as a management point. Would Cisco Security Manager not be the right tool for this?

We have SolarWinds and I've heard that you can assign UnDPs(Device Pollers) to devices you want to monitor, including ASAs and these pollers can give you trending for VPN sessions with graphing. I just want to make the most of our budget dollars.

Any advice?

Thanks, Pat.

[snimmaga]

CSM 4.3 and above can be used to monitor VPN sessions on Cisco ASAs. You can definitely use CSM as a monitoring only solution for ASAs (without using it for management). You can also explicitly disable policy change privileges for all admins so they do not modify stuff by mistake. Note however that CSM is primarily focused on end-to-end management scenarios (including policy change, troubleshooting, reporting, etc). So you may not find all the bells and whistles in CSM for monitoring scenarios that you may find with some of the pure monitoring only solutions.