Another New day another new class...

I completed my Programming in C# using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 last week sucessfully.  It was a very challenging course with lots and lots of new concepts to learn and understand.

Today I start the course 10267A Introduction to Web Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.  This promises to be the "bread and butter" web develelopment.  Some of the topics being covered are already known and some of the topics are new.  This course will wrap all the different elements of website development into a single solution. 

Last week I blogged about what an SNMP Manager was.  This week I will write some about how I have used SNMP.  SNMP has two primary purposes..  Purpose one is to look for trends or problems prior to them actually going wrong.  Purpose two is to alert you to issues/problems when they happen.  While both are very useful, it is obviously far better to see a problem coming at you prior to it's being an actual problem.  This will allow you to take steps to avoid the problem all together. 

In my experience I primarily monitored servers, routers and switches.  Checking to make sure all the interfaces (network connections) were active etc.  Because each device has different purpose you will want to monitor different things for each device type.  As an example for servers you want to ensure it is available to those connecting to them.  Can this device be pinged?  Is the response time threshold with proper tollerances.  Are the critical services the servers offers up and working correctly.  Does the C: drive of the server has adequate space?  To use SNMP properly and make it most meanigful each device must be looked at individually unless clustered.  There are some things that all servers have in common, (network interface, operating system, memory and such).  Then possible you can use a 'template' for overall monitoring and add other items specific to the actual function of that server.  Switches and routers will have very different functions you will want to monitor.

Tomorrow I discuss thresholds and alerts and show you how you can have more of the purpose one type alerts versus the 'i'm broken' alerts.

Remember to add your comments.  Let me hear from you.

Today's reader challenge - Let me know what software you are using for SNMP.