Network monitoring overview

The out-of-the-box network monitoring capability has been around since the original OpsMgr 2012 release and not much has changed since then. You have the ability to perform advanced monitoring of your network devices using SNMP or basic discovery and availability monitoring using ICMP (Ping).

If you use SNMP, you can get detailed monitoring of ports, interfaces, hardware, virtual local area networks (VLAN's), and even Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) groups. With ICMP, all you get is an indication that the IP address of the network device is responding to Ping requests with very little information about the underlying components or interfaces.

Although the network monitoring feature of OpsMgr won't have network administrators throwing out the specialist tools they use from the likes of Cisco, for the IT administrator and IT pro, it's still very useful when used in the overall context of IT service monitoring. This is because, regardless of the method used to...