Endpoint Monitoring

Endpoint monitoring allows network administrators to maintain the health of their IT infrastructure by flagging device errors before they cause issues. Admins need to be able to monitor all the devices and applications that exist in the network as well as their hardware and software statuses. Failing nodes can cause network-wide disruption if left unchecked, making network device monitoring an essential practice to help you keep services running smoothly.

SolarWinds NPM is an endpoint monitoring software program offering intelligence-driven features to help you automate network scanning, identify problem areas, map hardware health, and enable alerts to help with quick, proactive troubleshooting. This is especially useful for larger organizations that depend on hundreds of endpoints to keep their digital environments operating successfully but don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to manual surveillance.

As a complete endpoint monitoring solution, NPM allows you to configure custom alerts and organize collected data for flexible insights into the nodes you want to track more closely.

SolarWinds NPM can monitor any apparatus or software entity connected to a network, including smartphones, servers, smart devices, computers, and cloud applications. Network Insight™ features within NPM help monitor more advanced endpoints like Cisco ASA, Palo Alto firewalls, and F5 BIG-IP load balancers for complete node visibility and transparency.

After installing and configuring NPM, log in to the SolarWinds Platform Web Console. This should prompt the Discovery Wizard to start, or go to Settings and click on Network Discovery. Then go to Add New Discovery and click Start.

The Network panel will provide you with options to scale your endpoint monitoring system. We recommend adding a limit to IP addresses for your first discovery scan. You can scan your network by filtering through several options, including:

• IP Ranges: We recommend running several discovery sessions if you have many IP ranges to scan.
• Subnets: This feature allows you to find all IP addresses in a subnet.
• IP Addresses: If you’re looking to find a select few IP addresses that cannot be contained in a range, this filter would be your best option.
• Active Directory: For a more targeted discovery approach, you can scan an Active Directory Domain Controller to add groups of subnets without worrying about irrelevant endpoints being added to your inventory.
  
  

The Agents panel will appear if you activated the Quality of Experience (QoE) agent when installing NPM. This feature facilitates packet-level traffic monitoring for endpoints and ensures that all nodes with agents are consistently updated. You can disable this option if there are no agents in your network.

To discover virtual machines and ESX hosts within your network, go to the Virtualization Panel and click Poll for VMware. Then, select Add vCenter or ESX Credential. Click <New credential> and input the prompted information.

Next, head over to the SNMP panel. If your network only needs SNMPv1 and SNMPv2, select Next. Conversely, if your network uses an SNMPv3 credential or any other community string, add the unique credential and its required data.

The next panel is for Windows and RPC-enabled devices. Add any endpoint credentials that fall under this category. WMI is used instead of SNMP for more accurate and detailed Windows endpoint monitoring.

After filtering and setting your discovery options, you can either manually set up monitoring for devices after they’re discovered or enable automatic endpoint monitoring on the Monitoring Settings panel.

Finally, click Next on the Discovery Settings panel, accept the default frequency, and begin the discovery session. Prepare to wait anywhere between a few minutes to several hours, depending on the number of endpoints you intend to monitor.

NPM gathers information on all network elements by default for all manual discoveries, so you’ll have to uncheck the boxes for the endpoints you don’t want extensive visibility on. Be sure to select the device types, interfaces, and volume types you want constantly monitored. Once you’ve made your selections, review the list of endpoints and click Import. When the process is done, click Finish, go to the Home tab, and explore what each endpoint in your network is up to.

With so many devices, applications, and components involved in a network, it can be challenging to figure out which nodes and metrics are worth monitoring. A great starting place is to identify endpoints you know need improvement or have constantly failed. You may also want to think about the specific nodes you rely on the most to keep your network functioning.

Consider starting with a few firewalls, load balancers, edge routers, servers, hosts, switches, and physical devices. As you familiarize yourself with your discovery list, add nodes that will fill in visibility gaps throughout your network and remove those that aren’t necessary.

NPM has plenty of alerts to inform you of dysfunctional network nodes. The Node Down alert informs you of endpoints that don’t respond to a data poll, which you can view on the Home page via the Active Alerts widget. If you don’t have an alert widget, you can view notifications by going to My Dashboards > Network > Network Top 10.

For endpoints that are down, check if there’s sufficient power and if they’re connected to the network. Otherwise, click the flagged node to view details about its performance. Check each endpoint’s response time, CPU load, memory usage, packet loss, and other vital statistics to help narrow down the main problem.

Once you’ve spotted and resolved the issue, investigate what triggered the alert by going to Node Details > Alerts for this Node > Alert Details.