LAN Health Check

[Lukman Salifu]

I am working on a project at work and need some suggestions. I need to develop a LAN health check process/guideline to perfrom LAN health checks.

I am evaluating some tools from Solar Winds and would like to try some from cisco, any ideas on what i could use, cisco commands etc.

I am interested in what goes on in the LAN part of the network, errors on ports, port-channels, trunks and interfaces.

Any suggestions is welcomed.

[johnlloyd_13]

hi,

how about enabling NetFlow and/or SNMP to make your LAN health check easier?

[Lukman Salifu]

SNMP is enabled and with testing am doing so far its good. Netflow isnt, the other issue is the amount of network resource that will be used up when these tools are used. 

[Leo Laohoo]

Nearly all of the network monitoring tools, from CA Spectrum to Solarwinds, WhatsUpGold, Cisco PI, etc., they all use SNMP to regularly poll and retrieve data. 

If you have people who are good at SNMP and PERL scripting, you can generally replicate what the above software developers have done and tailor it exactly to meet your needs.

[Lukman Salifu]

We have Spectrum, unfortunately it doenst store historical data like Solarwinds. Building a custom solution would be great if i had more time to get this done. I code and can do perl with a crush course on it. will try whatsupgold.

Whats your experience with any of these, will they take up network resources when polling from remote locations?

[Leo Laohoo]

That'll depend on the frequency of their polling.  Because products like these use SNMP, it's not bandwidth intensive.  

If you are going to code the application yourself, good on you.  You'll need to do a lot of SNMP get to figure out what you want.  If you want to build up a historical data then you'll need to spin up an SQL database and you'll need to code those too.  

The good part about what you are doing is that you tailor the application to suit your need and requirements.  This is more true when you want to generate reports.  With Cisco PI, for example, there are a set amount of reporting options.  These reporting options cannot be adjusted.  If you want a report thats not in the menu then you'll need to generate several reports and correlate them.  This process alone is a waste of time and CPU resources.   

[Emmanuel Valdez]

Hi,

If you don´t have access to Cisco Prime LAN Management Solution, you can test an open source LMS called Cacti or Nagios, these platform use SNMP and you can check  and graph many parameter would you like, since CPU, RAM, Interface Traffic, Interface errors, etc. Nowadays I used it for some networks and work very nice but Cisco Prime LMS is the best option for Cisco equipment.

Please rate if it was useful.

Regards.

[Lukman Salifu]

I will try out the tools you recommended.

On the flip side cisco Prime doesnt come cheap right? if i could get it to evaluate it would be great. Am a bit worried about it taking too much network resources that might impact on the switch performance

[Emmanuel Valdez]

Hi Salifu,

If you are working for a Cisco Partner you can obtain Cisco Prime with a NFR License for a very low price and evaluate the solution, you only will need VMware to deploy the virtual machine, I can remember a trial license and I think that everybody can download it (you can try), you can check it from Cisco Marketplace under option Promotional Software Store.

Regards.

[Mitesh Manwatkar]

Hi,

Solarwinds NPM is by far better tool to monitor the network devices.

SNMP configuration is very easy to make and user friendly GUI makes ur job much easier.

Regards,

Mitesh Manwatkar.