Byte25 SNMP Monitoring

Introducing SNMP monitoring into the Byte25 Observability Solution  …

 

The July ’24 release (v2.5.0) sees the introduction of SNMP monitoring into the Byte25 Observability Solution.

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a long standing and well established protocol first released in the 1988. However SNMP still remains an important protocol for gathering performance metrics from network devices, in particular for monitoring switch and router interfaces.

The Byte25 SNMP implementation uses a distributed polling architecture supporting SNMP Versions 1, 2 and 3. One of the challenges of impementing SNMP for a SaaS based platform such as Byte25 is the ability to configure and control on-site polling appliances from a cloud server.

Byte25 relies on appliances (either physical or virtual) installed on customer sites to collect performance data via SNMP polling of locally connected network swicthes and routers. The performance data is then sent back to the Byte25 cloud server for analysis and reporting. Each onsite Byte25 appliance is controlled from the central Byte25 cloud dashboard.

A Quick Look at the Byte25 SNMP Solution   …

SNMP reports are available from a new sub tab on the Performance Overview dashboard. The SNMP Overview Dashboard provides an ‘at-a-glance’ summary of all polled SNMP device interfaces performance, availability and alarms.

Each entry in the SNMP Overview Dashboard is clickable to display detailled interface performance metrics. 

SNMP Interface Detail

The SNMP Detail View provides real time and historical detail of SNMP polled device interfaces. The SNMP Detail View inherits the currently set global time period and includes a time-picker drop-down to allow user configurable time periods to be selected.

The summary tiles show maximum throughput, average throughput, line errors, alerts and outages for the selected time period. Asset information detail of the specific interface is also provided, such as, polling protocol, interface description and type, and user defined label.

The throughput and error charts show the historical performance. The SNMP charts use a 5 minute sample period irrespective of the selected time period to the most granular data available. 

 

Configuring SNMP Polling

Configuring SNMP polling from a cloud based dashboard is one of the most challenging areas for a distributed polling solution. Byte25 appliances are installed in customer premise networks typically behind firewalls that are not accessible from the Byte25 cloud server (that is, Byte25 appliances can communicate outbound to send data to the Byte25 cloud server but not contactable inbound fron the Internet).

Byte25 have developed a technique that allows remote SNMP configuration of internal Byte25 appliances from the cloud server. The screenshot below shows a sample SNMP configuration screen from the Byte25 Cloud Dashboard.

 

Configuring SNMP polling requires an interactive session between the cloud dashboard and the onsite installed apliance. All SNMP configuration is undertaken from the Byte25 cloud dashboard and is described here:

    • Establish bi-direction connection between Byte25 Cloud Dashboard and onsite installed Byte25 appliance.
    • Enter SNMP credentials of the device to be monitored
    • Retrieve polled device configuration and display on cloud dashboard
    • Select relevant interfaces to be monitored, custom labels and SNMP metrics to poll
    • Write new configuration to appliance to start SNMP polling.

For more information or to schedule a demonstration or trial of the Byte25 SNMP functionality,

please contact Byte25 directly at sales@byte25.com