Monitoring interfaces

An important aspect of monitoring network devices is to have visibility of the interfaces (or ports) on the devices that your servers are connected to. For example, these days network switches are fairly reliable and they rarely need to be replaced due to a hardware fault; however, it's entirely possible that someone working onsite in your datacenter might accidentally disconnect a network cable from the switch, resulting in a connectivity issue on your servers.

To ensure that you get alerted when a scenario like this occurs, OpsMgr provides the capability to monitor each individual interface on your network devices when using SNMP as part of your discoveries. Taking this into account, you might be surprised to learn that the default monitoring status for an interface that is connected to a computer is configured as not monitored! Only ports that connect to other network devices are monitored by default.

Although this might sound a little strange at first, when you think...