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User’s Guide – version 1.6 NetWatch
35
Chapter 8: Services, Discovery and Polling
If you are new to configuring NetWatch, please refer to Chapter 2, “Configuration”
for a step-by-step guide to setting up devices before reading this chapter. This chapter
describes in detail the operation and advanced configuration of the various types of
monitoring NetWatch can carry out on a device.
How NetWatch services work
Most of the information gathered by NetWatch about a network is gathered on
a device-by-device basis. Each device on a network, be it a router, switch or
application server offers a number of different services to its users, including network
management stations like NetWatch. These services are things like basic network
connectivity, connections to other networks and applications like web or telnet
servers. Since the services offered by a device are of several different types,
NetWatch handles them differently.
Discovery
Whenever you change the types of service you wish to monitor on a device,
you must discover services on the device. What this does is contact the device to
determine what individual services of each type the device supports. For example,
when a device with an SNMP Interface Test service type is discovered, a service is
created for each interface the device contains.
Each service type can be configured with default properties that are applied to each of
the services it creates. These properties set things like the average and maximum
response times NetWatch should experience when it checks the status of a service on
the device. You can change these properties for some or all of the services after they
have been discovered if you find the defaults are producing too many alerts.
The SNMP Interface Test service
The SNMP Interface Test service type can be added to any device that
supports SNMP. See Appendix B for more information about SNMP. On discovery, a
service is created for each interface the device supports. You may find that many
more services are created than the device has physical interfaces. This can happen for
many reasons; some WAN interfaces are divided into many lower-capacity sub
interfaces; ISDN interfaces are usually reported by a router as separate bearer
channels; virtual dialler interfaces are often detected; and sometimes an interface is
listed by a device more than once on order to provide special management features.