Fluke Network Router manual User’s Guide - version, NetWatch

User’s Guide – version 1.6 NetWatch

This service type is one of the most powerful supported by NetWatch. Along with testing the status of an interface, a service can be configured to read usage information for the interface. This allows you to create graphs of bandwidth utilisation for an interface, and allows the map applet to colour links according to their percentage utilisation.

When you add the SNMP Interface Test service type there are several options you can configure to control how the discovered services will work.

￿Average Response Time: This is the average time in milliseconds you would expect a successful check of the status and utilisation of a single interface to take. This is used to decide when to raise an alert that a device is responding slowly. If you are unsure of this, leave the default value of 200 milliseconds. If you are monitoring a device across a slow WAN link, or if you experience a lot of slow response time alerts on the device it may be a good idea to raise this value.

￿Maximum Response Time: This is the maximum number of milliseconds NetWatch will wait for a response from the device before retrying a check or giving up. After the third timeout NetWatch will stop trying to check the status of an interface and report a timeout as the status of that interface. You may find that some interfaces are reporting timeouts and some report a proper status; this can happen when a device is very busy and is ignoring a lot of the SNMP requests it receives. You may wish to change this value if you find this is the case; a shorter maximum response time with a higher number of retries would be more likely to get a status for each interface (at the expense of slightly more network traffic).

￿SNMP Community String: This is the read-only community set up on your device. Usually a device supporting SNMP will have two communities, which are rather like passwords, one of which only allows the reading of values and the other that allows reading and writing of some values. In a great many cases the community that supports reading only is the default value, “public”. If you find that the SNMP Interface Test is not working you may need to check this value. Note that this value belongs to the service type on the device; you can’t change it for an individual service.

￿Use Netwatch Server Clock By Default, Netwatch uses the time on the device being managed to record various time related statistics. This is the ideal solution in most situations. However on some highly utilised devices the time reported can be incorrect. In this situation it is advised that you use the time on the Netwatch server.

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