Cisco Network Device Monitoring Software
Automatically discover and identify Cisco network devices
Keeping track of the devices in your network is crucial. SolarWinds® Network Performance Monitor (NPM) simplifies device discovery by eliminating the need to use arcane CLI commands to discover and identify the Cisco devices on your network.
With NPM’s Cisco device monitoring features, you can automatically discover and monitor Cisco devices. Use the intuitive SolarWinds NPM dashboard to enable any critical nodes you would like to monitor, then add the relevant Cisco devices to your inventory.
Have equipment from multiple vendors? No need to worry. The Orion® Platform Discovery Wizard tool can discover a broad range of devices. With NPM’s network monitoring tools, you can monitor the health and performance of any SNMP-enabled device.
Dynamically map Cisco network devices and performance
Manually mapping your network devices can be time-consuming and frustrating, particularly when trying to keep up with changing topologies—and the bigger and more dynamic the network is, the more difficult it becomes to maintain an up-to-date network topology map. With device monitoring features, you can easily create dynamic custom network topology maps that display device performance metrics, connectivity, and link utilization. This means you can visualize the performance of your entire network at a glance, making tracking performance metrics a breeze.
Network monitoring software’s mapping features let you visualize and aggregate data in a highly intuitive way, so you can rapidly identify the root cause of problems—even in complex networks.
Visualize performance and availability across your entire network
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor makes Cisco network device monitoring easy with fully customizable dashboards and charts that allow you to view the performance and availability of your Cisco devices at a glance.
To monitor Cisco devices in your network, NPM polls the MIBS on your devices and obtains critical performance metrics. NPM then displays this information in user-friendly dashboards you can tailor to suit your preferences. This tool can help you ensure the performance and availability of your Cisco ASA firewalls.
This powerful Cisco device monitoring software feature can be presented on the PerfStack™ dashboard, which allows you to compare disparate data types, correlate your data on a common timeline, and share data across teams.
Monitor multiple Cisco device types, including advanced network devices
SolarWinds NPM offers comprehensive Cisco device monitoring, so you can integrate your approach to Cisco network monitoring into a single tool. NPM provides support for Cisco devices including ACI devices like spine switches and Nexus leaf.
This tool allows you to view the overall health of your Cisco SwitchStack members, rapidly locate switches with problems, and monitor member data connections. You can also monitor Nexus device performance and Cisco ASA firewalls, affording you in-depth visibility into the ASA infrastructure, so you can safeguard service availability.
With NPM’s automatic Cisco device discovery feature, identifying, mapping, and monitoring all your network’s Cisco components couldn’t be easier.
Receive network alerts and troubleshoot issues
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor includes a broad range of network troubleshooting features that integrate your Cisco devices and other network components into a single-page path analysis. This simplifies troubleshooting, which enables you to identify the root cause of issues faster.
From NPM’s central control dashboard, you can monitor performance, device configuration details, and traffic, consolidating your troubleshooting and analysis activities.
To minimize the number of unnecessary alerts you receive, NPM also features topology-aware, intelligent network alerting capabilities. You can personalize your alerts system, so you don’t receive non-critical notifications during your off hours.
With Network Performance Monitor’s sophisticated troubleshooting features and intelligent alerts, you can stay in the loop and resolve issues quickly—without the noise.
Get More on Cisco Device Monitoring
What is the purpose of Cisco network device monitoring? What are the benefits?
The primary purpose of Cisco network device monitoring is to ensure the optimal performance of your network, enable troubleshooting, and facilitate informed capacity planning.
Cisco network device monitoring can help you achieve the following:
- Monitor your VPN tunnels to certify connectivity between sites
- Ensure services dependent on your Cisco ASA firewalls are available
- Gain insight into the health of your individual SwitchStack members
- Monitor the connections between SwitchStack members
- Locate switches with issues quickly
- Monitor the performance and health of Nexus devices
- View your configured virtual Port Channels (vPCs)
- Poll the statistics of ACI hardware components, such as spine switches and Nexus leaf
Cisco network device monitoring can provide you with a comprehensive view of your network’s health and performance. With the right Cisco network devices management tools, you can significantly improve and streamline your network performance monitoring processes.
How does NPM monitor Cisco ACI devices?
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor provides coverage of your Cisco OIDs, enabling you to poll numerous statistics for ACI hardware components. This includes spine switches and Nexus leaf.
With NPM’s Cisco ACI device monitoring capabilities, you can set up API polling for your API devices. You’ll be able to monitor key components in the SDN environment, such as application profiles, tenants, leaf and spine switches, and endpoint groups.
NPM also enables you to view the health scores for your ACI members, the SDN infrastructure via Orion Maps, the health status and score of your ACI entity, as well as historical data through the SolarWinds PerfStack analysis dashboard.
Setting up Cisco ACI device monitoring with NPM is simple. Add an APIC node for monitoring or enable the ACI monitoring feature on an APIC node currently being monitored in NPM.
How does NPM monitor Cisco Nexus devices?
With NPM’s Network Insight for Cisco Nexus features, you can monitor the performance and health of all your Nexus devices. NPM also enables you to view configured vPCs, peer vPCs, and Switch Virtual Interfaces (SVIs).
To simplify Nexus device monitoring, a Node Details view is available in NPM. This view includes a subview for Interfaces and Nexus-relevant vPCs.
NPM polls data for Cisco Nexus switch monitoring through a combination of CLI polling and SNMP polling. To access accurate information specific to Nexus devices, add the Nexus device as a node to NPM and provide the necessary CLI credentials.
NPM uses CLI polling alongside SNMP polling to provide additional details on vPCs, peer vPCs, keep-alive links, and related interfaces.
How does NPM monitor Cisco SwitchStack devices?
SolarWinds NPM’s Cisco SwitchStack device monitoring capabilities allow you to view the overall health of any individual SwitchStack member. You can also use the tool to monitor data and power connections between SwitchStack members and rapidly locate any switches with issues.
NPM includes out-of-the-box alerts and events to notify you immediately if members or connections between members go down.
When you are notified of a problem, you can access a SwitchStack subview via the node details page. This subview consolidates important SwitchStack information, giving you access to individual member monitoring functionality, as well as topology maps displaying how power ports and data ports connect.
NPM makes it easy to identify which switches are experiencing issues by allowing you to locate them by their serial number. You can then replace the switch or opt for an alternative method of resolution.
How does NPM monitor Cisco ASA firewalls?
NPM’s Cisco ASA firewall monitoring features automate the management and monitoring of your ASA infrastructure, providing enhanced visibility and helping safeguard your service availability.
NPM monitors your Cisco ASA firewalls by monitoring your VPN tunnels to ensure connections between sites are maintained. This includes the monitoring of bandwidth usage and tunnel status. You can also use NPM to monitor your firewall health by detecting failovers and tracking high availability status.
NPM offers out-of-the-box alerts for flagging failover on any ASA nodes, High Availability going down, and connections exceeding the ASA node threshold.
Out-of-the-box reports are also available with NPM, allowing you to report on VPN site-to-site tunnel history and remote access tunnel history.
- What is the purpose of Cisco network device monitoring? What are the benefits?
- How does NPM monitor Cisco ACI devices?
- How does NPM monitor Cisco Nexus devices?
- How does NPM monitor Cisco SwitchStack devices?
- How does NPM monitor Cisco ASA firewalls?
What is the purpose of Cisco network device monitoring? What are the benefits?
The primary purpose of Cisco network device monitoring is to ensure the optimal performance of your network, enable troubleshooting, and facilitate informed capacity planning.
Cisco network device monitoring can help you achieve the following:
- Monitor your VPN tunnels to certify connectivity between sites
- Ensure services dependent on your Cisco ASA firewalls are available
- Gain insight into the health of your individual SwitchStack members
- Monitor the connections between SwitchStack members
- Locate switches with issues quickly
- Monitor the performance and health of Nexus devices
- View your configured virtual Port Channels (vPCs)
- Poll the statistics of ACI hardware components, such as spine switches and Nexus leaf
Cisco network device monitoring can provide you with a comprehensive view of your network’s health and performance. With the right Cisco network devices management tools, you can significantly improve and streamline your network performance monitoring processes.
"SolarWinds greatly helps us ensure that potential network issues are resolved before they affect service delivery which goes a long way to justifying the investment"
Phil Rogers
Head of Networks
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Easily monitor Cisco devices
Network Performance Monitor
- Comprehensive fault monitoring and performance management for your network.
- Get to the root cause quicker with intelligent, dependency- and topology-aware network alerts.
- Monitor multiple Cisco device types, including ASA firewalls, SwitchStack, and Nexus.
