Home
Networking
Monitoring (Hardware)

Monitoring (Hardware)

Using monitoring in Splynx you can track the status of your network and in case any device goes down, the system will automatically notify the responsible admins via the portal, email, SMS or each method comdined. Splynx is using SNMP and ping tools to monitor devices.

Add a new device

To add a new device, under Networking section find Hardware option:

hardware

Inside this menu you can add a new device using Add button, display list of all devices, view recently selected monitoring device and check backups of these devices.

Let's click on Add button and add a new device into monitoring:

new_device

Title - name of the device;
Parent - select a parent device (if exists). You can build a parent-child relations in Splynx monitoring;
Vendor - vendor name. You can add more vendors under Config → Networking → Monitoring;
Product/Model - information about the device model;
IP address - IPv4 of the device to which SNMP and Ping tools will connect;
Port - SNMP port;
Ping this device - if enabled, Splynx will ping the device to track connectivity;
SNMP Monitoring - if enabled, Splynx will connect via SNMP to device and load available information. Should be also enabled on a device;
SNMP community - define community, using "public" is insecure. We recommend to create some custom community on a device and use it;
SNMP Version - select version (2 is recommended);
Type - select type. You can add more types under Config → Networking → Monitoring;
Group - define a group for the device. This field is for notifications configuration;
Partners - defines the partner that can see the device;
Location - defines a location;
Address - information about the address where device is installed;
Send notifications - enable/disable sending of notifications if device goes down/up;
Delay timer for notification - set a delay in minutes to send notification about status change. If device is down, Splynx will wait for 10 minutes and, if the status remains the same, will send a notification.

When device is up and running, we can see the status:

device_info

As you can see, Splynx is able to ping this IP. If device is unreachable, ping will be also unreachable and status of "Last ping statuses" will be negative.

Graphs

That was initial configuration to get ping and SNMP status of the device. To monitor some advanced parameters we can use SNMP OIDs to get the values and measure such thing as CPU performance, memory usage, voltage or interface's speed. First of all we need to get available SNMP OIDs to build some graphs. We can do this under tab "SNMP OID":

SNMP_OID

You can run SNMP walk to get all available OIDs or add it manually using Add SNMP OID button. Let's click on SNMP walk to load OIDs automatically and avoid manual input mistakes:

snmp_walk

Here you can load all OIDs or for interfaces only. Let's click on Get all button and wait 1-2 minutes for a result.

Once this done, click on SNMP walk to see all OIDs that we received from a device:

snmp_walk_result

For example we need to monitor ether1 port bandwidth so we need to click on "+" under these values:

add_oid

IMPORTANT: First, add OIDs. Next, build a graph. Make sure you specified the type for RRD Data Source Type (for example, Counter) to build a graph.

add_oid2

As a result, we added 2 SNMP OIDs for monitoring in/out values of ether1 interface. Now we can create a graph with these OIDs.

add_oid3

To build a graph, let's switch to "Graphs" tab and click on Add Graph:

add_graph

add_graph2

Here you need to specify title, vertical title and the most important is add data sources. In this case, we need to select data source "ether1 in" and click add and after that select "ether1 out" and add. If you are going to measure the interface speed, factor value should be 8 and "value in" = Bps. Click on "Color" field to select a color and click on "Draw" field to select a way of displaying data (line or area). Click on Preview button to generate a preview and click on Add button to create a graph.

Now, under "Actions", near each graph you can click on "Edit", "View graph", "Delete" buttons. Let's click on "View graph":

list_of_graphs

You can select different periods of time here.

view_graph

Backups

Devices added to the monitoring list can also be configured for backups. Simply configure the login details, port to communicate (SSH),the command, and specify the hours which you would like to run backups:

configure_ssh

click on "Test connection" and "Test backup configuration" to ensure that it works:

test_connection

test_backup_config

We are using MikroTik "export" command to get an export of all settings.

Under Networking → Hardware → Backups you can find a list of all backups for all devices:

all_backups

Under "Actions", there are the following buttons:

View difference button: to see the difference of backups, you should have at least 2 backups.

Download button: you can download last backup.

Search button: search for any word in the backup:

Logs

Under Logs tab you can find log records:

logs

Notifications

It is possible to send a notification when some device goes down. First of all, add a notifications group under Config → Networking → Monitoring:

monitoring

Scroll down and find section Groups:

groups

add_group

With this setup, we can create a group "Engineers" which consists only of an administrator "admin". This administrator will receive email notification + portal notification on a dashboard. The subject of an email will be "Device alert!" and body of a message is defined with email template that can be updated.

After this, we need to change a group for the device:

select_group

So as per device configuration, an administrator from a group "Engineers" should receive a notification if device is down for more than 10 minutes.

Other

Charts and SNMP values from Monitoring can be used in Splynx Weathermap add-on as on example below. Make you sure you have this add-on installed under Config → Integrations → Add-ons:

addon