Now we're going to talk about monitoring systems with SNMP.
This is where all of the work that we've done elsewhere in
the course comes together and we use all of our knowledge
in a real-world scenario.
Basically, in this module,
we are going to install a network management system and
configure monitoring of the devices that we've configured SNMP
on in the network management system.
Once that's done,
we'll examine the results and we'll discuss how it can be used in a
real world monitoring and troubleshooting scenario.
So here we are on our management server and we have been tasked with
installing a network management system to watch all of our servers,
even if there's only one other Windows Server and a Linux Server and our router,
but still, we'd like to get statistics on them if at all possible.
So to do that, we're going to install a network management system.
There are dozens of them out there, some that are free and open source,
others that cost tens of thousands of dollars.
For our purposes, we're going to install PRTG.
PRTG is a very flexible platform and it actually has a free version where
you can monitor just a few devices if that's all you need.
So I've already downloaded the installer and we're just
going to run through the install,
and we'll bring up some concepts that you need to keep
in mind when you're installing these.
So with PRTG,
once you select the language and agree to the obligatory license terms,
you're asked for the email address to send alerts to.
Now obviously, this can be changed later,
but it's a good idea to put a group mailing list in here so that more
than one person gets alerted if there is an outage.
Again, in a very small shop where you're the only person,
that may not be an issue.
So we'll enter my email address and we'll hit Next.
Once we enter that,
we give it the license information that we were given when we downloaded the
product and the product launches into the installation.
And once it's complete, it launches into the rest of the setup process.
Once the installation is done, it will launch a scan of your network.
Now obviously, at this point,
it doesn't have the SNMP credentials and we didn't leave them at public,
so it won't be able to actually gather any information on
them other than maybe the hostname,
but it will at least do a ping probe and let you know what devices it sees.
So now that it's complete,
the little guide here is showing you where to go to change
the password and to complete the setup.
So we'll do as it asks and change the password,
and with that,
we've done basic setup and configuration of the network monitoring system.
As we go through the rest of this module,
we will set the individual settings for monitoring and we
will also ensure that it's actually gathering the information from the devices in our network.