SCOM Trick 30 – Monitor Network Devices

As we want to monitor everything with SCOM we also want to pull in the network devices. There are several different ways to do this in SCOM 2007 R2. Let’s go from very simple basic monitoring to more extensive monitoring. Here are a number of possibilities:
You can ping the machines with a free ping management pack.
You can add the network device to SCOM if you have an SNMP read string on that device in the SCOM console (Administration – device management – network devices). This will basically just check if SNMP gives a reply on the device.
You can check if the xSNMP management pack created by Kristopher Bash (free) does what you want. In many cases this is suitable and is a lot deeper than the previous methods. You can find it at: http://xsnmp.codeplex.com/ . I like this MP a lot.
Of course it is always possible to first add a network device as mentioned previously and create SNMP monitors yourself. If you know your way around SNMP you could do this.
Jalasoft offers the Xian Network Manager IO R2 enabling deep monitoring of network devices:
http://www.jalasoft.com/Web/Product/Product.aspx?id=54
Opslogix bring us both the free Ping management pack http://www.opslogix.com/ping and the Network management pack http://www.opslogix.com/network-management-pack . The last one also offers deep monitoring of network devices.
JaxMP also offers network monitoring: http://www.jaxmp.com/
In the next version of SCOM, the SCOM 2012, we will also get network monitoring built in. We will see more and more information regarding this in the coming months. And of course I will be blogging about it in a while.

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