subject: How to Monitor Any Device Statistic You Want To [print this page] Have you ever wanted to measure something unique on one of your network devices, but weren't sure how ? Although many manufacturers may offer device-specific data within MIBs, that doesn't always mean that the information is going to be really easy to get into your network performance monitoring system.
Here are some examples of data that you may want to get from devices, but are not traditionally gathered. Say you have some device models that are notoriously known for overheating. If that is the case, you may want to be able to get environmental statistics out of your device. Or perhaps you are getting started with virtualization, and you want to monitor VMWare health statistics for your virtualized equipment.
These are just a few scenarios, and there are many more of them out there. Whatever the case may be, it is entirely possible that you need to get a universal device poller. What this tool can do for you is gather data from a manufacturers' MIB and send it on to your NPM software. That way you can perform network monitoring on these devices the way that you want to which means getting data that is imperative to you.
You're probably concerned about how much time this is going to take you in terms of configuration, but rest assured, using a universal device poller is pretty easy, especially if you can get the OID from a MIB. If you have some trouble doing this, there are community resources from which you can also try to get this information from. As with most network configuration issues, it's pretty likely that you're not the first one to have this particular problem.
Using a universal device poller can help you get that hard to reach data and then have it in your network performance management system where it needs to be to help you troubleshoot issues. Don't try to do this manually get the right tools to make tasks like this much easier.
