So now that we've set up our network server for network management,
let's go ahead and configure our network management system.
Now PRTG has the concept of inheritance where you define certain setting
at the root and you can have different groups that may inherit those
settings or may not inherit those settings.
For our purposes,
they're all going to pretty much have the same settings because all
we're doing is SNMP and there's only a few devices,
so we'll go ahead and click on the root,
and again, every system is different, but with PRTG,
you can go ahead and change the settings right here at the
root and it will flow down to everyone else.
So we'll go ahead and configure our SNMP community strings.
We'll also go ahead and configure our credentials for Linux systems
just so we can get more detailed information.
So I'll go ahead and give it this username and password
here like so and we'll also go down further and change the
credentials for SNMP devices.
Now this is where you can choose the SNMP version.
At least with PRTG,
there are some limitations to SNMP v3 if you have a very large network.
We're going to keep things simple and just do SNMP v2
polling because the concepts are the same when you're
talking about a network management system.
So we'll go ahead and change our community string to GLOBO-RO,
which is our read-only string.
And you see if we scroll further down,
we have credentials for database management and Amazon,
MQTT, and we have SNMP compatibility options.
Now for most of us, the default values will work just perfectly.
You always want to make sure you use 64-bit counters,
especially if you're using SNMP v2, but otherwise,
the defaults work fine.
We have proxy settings on the scanning interval,
which is every 60 seconds, and if the query fails,
what do we want to do.
We set it to warning for one interval, which is 60 seconds,
and then set it to down if it doesn't come back up.
So that way, it can miss a cycle for network congestion or any issues like that.
Since that's all we pretty much want to change here,
we'll go ahead and click Save.
So now that we've set the system to false,
let's go ahead and see if we can configure our Linux box.
So we'll scroll down here to the Linux Mac OS UNIX and we'll click on this guy,
and I've already done the discovery and it recommends adding these two sensors.
We get the ping and the uptime through SNMP,
but we'll go ahead and add the disk and the memory and CPU information.
So we'll add that and add those as well.
Now the sensors are where the rubber meets the road,
that's where you get more information other than
just the ping time and the uptime.
Depending upon the device,
you can get all kinds of information like Windows devices can tell
you what services are running or not running.
You can get information about disk access, etc, not all of that through SNMP.
You might have to use WMI to get that,
but we'll talk about WMI when we go to a Windows Server.
We'll at least touch on it because it's tangentially related to SNMP
as in it is still a network management protocol.
While we're waiting for those sensors to be added,
we'll go ahead and look at the system information for an example.
And you'll see here for the contact info and the location,
you remember that setting from when we configured our
Linux box sitting on the dock of the bay,
there's the location information.
So it shows that we now we have the correct SNMP information,
so now we just have to wait for it to finish configuring everything.
We've got a lot of errors on here just because it has not
been fully set up in the systems yet.
Go back to Overview and see if it's added those sensors yet,
and there we are, Disk Free, iNodes Free,
Load Average, and Meminfo.
So if we look at the load average as an example,
you'll see that it's 0 because it's just now started scanning 47 seconds ago. But now we're going to move on and configure our Windows Server.