SCOM 2012 Network Monitoring - Dude, Where's My Network Device Components?

With System Center 2012 Operations Manager (SCOM / OpsMgr 2012), we now have some excellent new Network Monitoring functionality that I've previously blogged about how to configure and described what type of discoveries where available.

Sometimes though, when administrators or consultants deploy the SCOM 2012 Network Monitoring feature, they find that SCOM doesn't retrieve the information and discoveries on their network devices that they had initally hoped for or read about.

Instead they find that all that get's discovered is the network interface that the device was initally discovered on and it has simply performed an availability poll to return a health status back to the console- effectively giving them just a simple "Up or Down" scenario which is pretty much the same type of network monitoring that was made available out of the box with SCOM 2007 R2.

The screenshot below shows an example of this basic level of network monitoring

If this scenario seems familiar to you and you are contemplating scrapping the built-in network monitoring features of SCOM 2012 and instead downloading and importing the old and reliable xSNMP Extensions MP that delivered so much in SCOM 2007 R2, then DON'T!

First up, the xSNMP Extensions MP breaks cookdown in SCOM 2012 and won't work. All it will do is impact performance in your newly deployed SCOM 2012 environment and cause you endless headache.

Secondly, there is a valid reason as to why you are only seeing basic availability monitoring with your network devices.

SCOM 2012 lets you discover and monitor a large variety of different vendors network devices. It monitors any network device that supports SNMP and also provides extended monitoring for devices that implement the Management Information Base (MIB) RFC 2863 and MIB-II RFC 1213 standards.

It's this extended monitoring that delivers the deep level discoveries and performance data that you are looking for.

Microsoft have published an Excel spreadsheet with a list of over 800 network devices that support the extended monitoring capability of SCOM 2012. The information in the list is based on OID, device type, vendor, model name, and whether or not the processor and memory are monitored as part of the extended monitoring function.

The Excel spreadsheet list can be downloaded from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26831

From the spreadsheet (see screenshot below) you can see what level of network monitoring you can expect from your device.

The level of information that you are going to see is dependent on the MIB that Microsoft has used in the discovery. If your device is on the list then it will be “Certified” and this means that some level of detailed monitoring will take place that can include information on Processor, Memory and Chassis.

The screen below shows an example of a Certified network device in SCOM

If your network device is not on the Excel spreadsheet then it will be discovered in SCOM as a “Generic” network device, and it's this type of basic monitoring that you would have encountered in the first place.

A quick way to see what type of monitoring is available for your already discovered network devices in SCOM is to simply click on the Monitoring tab within the Operations Manager console, then browse to the Network Monitoring folder and click on the Network Devices view.

Once here, click on the Personalize View link from the Tasks pane on the right-hand side of the screen and in the Columns To Display section, choose the Certification check box then click OK

This view will then show you the type of certification that your network device holds as shown below

Hopefully this post has now given you an understanding of the different certification types and the associated diagram views they can produce for your network devices.