Network Management and Monitoring made Easier

Just about every monitoirng tool I have evaluated has the ability to do a network scan and import devices into tool based on some criteria you fill in.

Working for a big company for 15+ years I realize that they change support vendors a lot.

So a great strategy for importing devices into your monitoring tool can be handeled two different ways in my opinion.

OPTION A

Use a specific IP address range for management of the devices. Maybe you assign a certain IP range/subnet for the management ip on routers (which could be managed by one vendor). Then you assign a different IP range/subnet for the management ip address on switches. so on and so forth. So when you import devices you can specify the range you want to monitor.

OPTION B

Use different SNMP addresses. So each vendor will have there own SNMP address and all they need to do is add your monitoring device in the allowed access list. This means when a new vendor comes in you will be able to pull in there devices by using there particular SNMP address (hopefully its different then the default public and private).