Best practices for monitoring the quality of frame cir 1

[slyride]

Hello, The powers that be above me are trying to get a idea about how much downtime our frame network experiences. Does anyone have any recommendations? Also we are a low budget non-profit shop... Currently we are using Microsofts SBS HealthMonitor with ping alerts set up on it that sample every 2 minutes. There are about 30 sites and so far today they have gone to warning state from failing one ping twice for each site. Is this acceptable? Is the ping method flawed to use. TIA

 

[robertjo24]

We use Whats Up Gold to monitor our approx 80 Frame sites. The frame sites are set to ping once a minute, 3000ms time out w/three retries. We alarm if they fail after the three retries.
Keep in mind, occasional intermittant pings can be caused by normal traffic patterns. I had a site alarming every day at the site time during the last few days of the month. As it turns out, it was several individuals from the site trying to complete online reporting at the same time, bogging down the connection.

Intermittant pings should promt a look at the routers' serial interface to look for errored packets, CRC's, frame losses, etc. We also monitor interfaces with MRTG, and do quick "real time" interface looks with STG Trafic Grapher (

http://leonidvm.chat.ru/).

As far as going to a warning state for failing one ping twice, I quess it's up to the individual, but I would alert on a higher loss of pings than that.

 

[bf0x]

HP Openview and CiscoWorks2000.

 

[tetaguila]

wi agree with robertjo24..whatsupgold is great..we are using it also...

 

[slyride]

I just checked out the Whatsup Premium and it looks very nice, especially for the price. We have already purchased servers alive though so this will have to wait until next year or so, although I still hope to demo whatsup. Thanks for the recommendations!