Q: Why do I need network monitoring?

Our software helps insure that you know more about your technology than your users do. When an outage occurs, you will be amongst the first to know. You will have additional performance metrics available to you, so you can see the long-term trends on your systems and network infrastructure.

As users become increasingly reliant on technology, the world has shifted from a 9-5 atmosphere to one that operates 24×7x365. As the internet continues to gain acceptance throughout the world, downtime becomes more and more critical. It is key that you know more about your technology operations than your customers do. Even short downtimes can result in great dissatisfaction by the end users. Whether their dissatisfaction turns into lost sales, fewer blog subscribers, or simply a negative association with your company, this frustration must be managed.

Q: We already have network monitoring on our network, why do we need yours too?

When you monitor your network from within your network, you always see the best case. However, your users will not be viewing your services from within your network, they will be using your services from all over the world. This means that you need to know what they are seeing. There are many cases where your network monitoring will look perfect from within your network, but remote users will be completely shut out of your site.

Our software provides remote network monitoring, so you see what the end users will see. This gives you a more accurate picture of the performance of your internet services.

Q: What is SNMP? Is it required?

SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol. It is a service available on most servers and network devices that allow remote monitoring systems to probe data from them. Our system supports SNMP for most servers and network devices. However, this relies on SNMP being configured properly on the remote end (on your server or router). While we can’t help support this directly, here are some links that should help you configure it on your system.

Microsoft Windows Servers

• http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/winntas/deploy/implemen.mspx?mfr=true

GNU/Linux or UNIX (net-snmp)

• http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/docs/INSTALL.html

Cisco Network Devices

• http://www.netcraftsmen.net/welcher/papers/snmprouter.html

If you have a device that our SNMP prober doesn’t seem to understand, let us know at support at klogie.com. We can investigate and get it added to our database of supported SNMP devices, so it will work in the future.

Q: How should I configure my SNMP server?

We can’t tell you exactly how to configure it on your server or network device, but here are some general guidelines.

We require SNMP v1/2c enable on the client. You should not use the community string “public” for your devices. Just go into the klogie control panel and check the enable SNMP box and tell us what the community string is. Once you have done that, you should be able to re-probe the host and find all of the SNMP goodies in there (warning, there will be a lot!)

For more information about SNMP on your specific platform, the following links may help…

Microsoft Windows Servers

• http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/winntas/deploy/implemen.mspx?mfr=true

GNU/Linux or UNIX (net-snmp)

• http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/docs/INSTALL.html

Cisco Network Devices

• http://www.netcraftsmen.net/welcher/papers/snmprouter.html

If you have a device that our SNMP prober doesn’t seem to understand, let us know at support at klogie.com. We can investigate and get it added to our database of supported SNMP devices, so it will work in the future.

Q: Isn’t SNMP a security risk?

It can be when configured improperly. To improve the security of your SNMP installation, we recommend the following:

• Change your community string to something other than “public”. If you use “public” as your SNMP community string, you will give anyone on the internet access to your performance data.
• Do not enable read-write SNMP access for any users. Only allow read-only SNMP access on your device.
• Only allow TCP/UDP port 515 to access your network from our SNMP proxy server. We advise our customers to permit all IP traffic into their network from our monitoring servers. Our moitoring servers currently reside at: 207.36.232.245/26.

Q: What can I monitor with this system?

Lots of things! We don’t keep a complete list of services you can monitor, since it will depend on your hosts configuration as to what can be monitored.

That being said, we monitor most of the common services that run on a server as well as many distinct SNMP statistics. In fact, we monitor so many different SNMP statistics, you would probably never want to enable all of them.

To summarize, Klogie monitors:

• Basic network availability (ping)
• Common TCP/UDP ports (http, https, ftp, mysql, ... and many others!)
• Many, many SNMP statistics (network, disk, memory, and CPU statistics ... and many others!)

Q: How do I add users to my account?

A user must be configured as ‘site-admin’ to manage users within the klogie control panel. The first user created for your site is automatically created as the site-admin.

Also, users can self-register using a site authorization key provided during the signup process. Just distribute this key to the people who should have accounts, then they will be able to register through the web site and they will automatically be affiliated with your account.

Q: How much does it cost?

Currently, the system is in beta, so it is offered at no cost. However, we will be pursuing a purely usage-based pricing model, where users are allowed to configure monitoring to meet their needs and are only charged for what they use.

Q: What kind of notifications can I receive?

We provide two fields that can be populated with an email address. We call them the email and epager fields. Email is obvious, but epager confuses some people. We do not currently use an SMS service to send notification to pagers and cell phones, however nearly all pager and mobile phones will have an email address associated with them.

Just enter the email address for your phone or pager into the epager field and you will receive notifications that are formatted for mobile devices. If you don't know what the email address is for your phone or pager, just send an email or open a ticket with support and they will help you figure it out.

Q: How do I receive notifications on my cell phone?

We provide two fields that can be populated with an email address. We call them the email and epager fields. Email is obvious, but epager confuses some people. We do not currently use an SMS service to send notification to pagers and cell phones, however nearly all pager and mobile phones will have an email address associated with them.

Just enter the email address for your phone or pager into the epager field and you will receive notifications that are formatted for mobile devices.

Q: Do I have to pay by credit card? Can I receive an invoice and pay by check?

We prefer for sites to pay by credit card, since we find it a little easier to work with, but if you need an invoice and want to pay by PO or check, we can work with that too! Just send an email to billing@klogie.com to make arrangements.

Q: Is there a way to stop monitoring my site temporarily?

Not right now. You have to delete the host or the service on the host to stop monitoring. When you add the host back into the system later, you will have to repeat any custom configuration steps you took previously.

Q: What is the difference between the GAUGE and COUNTER counter types?

When SNMP services are monitored, they are essentially probing the host for a number. Within the SNMP server, some values are stored using an incremental counter (such as network interface statistics) and the system is forced to compare against the last-probed value, others provide an absolute value can use the GAUGE type.

It’s kind of confusing and the klogie system usually probes the types correctly from the host running SNMP, so you really don’t need to change it unless you are really sure you know what you are doing.

Q: In the Per Data Souce options, how do I know what to set the upper/lower bounds to?

This varies widely, so we left it to be user-configurable. The reality is that you want to set the lowest upper bound that makes sense and the highest lower bound that makes sense. The best way to tell what those values are is by watching the service for a few days or weeks and looking at the graphs to see what the values were recorded for that data source.

Q: What does the poller latency graph really show me?

This is really an indication of how long the poller takes to probe your system for the specific information it is gathering. It is possible and completely common for different services to take longer to poll, however it is a valuable metric to detect early problems with a specified service.

For example, if you are monitoring your web server and notice that the time required to poll the service (poller latency) suddenly jumps to 4x the old average, this may be an early indicator that your web server is overloaded.