Fluke Network Router manual Services, Discovery and Polling, How NetWatch services work

User’s Guide – version 1.6 NetWatch

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.

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