Please suggest SNMP tutorials and free NMS SW

[n3mmr]

We need to get less amateurish managing our v1910 switches.

Please suggest good tutorials that takes us from absolute beginners in snmp to a good insight into after-the-fact simple analysis of network faults like bandwidth hogging, storms and or faulty ports and user equipment.

[Dunky]

Assuming you have configured your switches to point to a syslog server and configured SNMP traps, then a simple free syslog server would be a good place to start as this would give you easy visability of both syslog messages and SNMP traps.

I would recommend Visual Syslog Server which you can get from here -> https://sourceforge.net/projects/syslogserverwindows/

You can then configure various flters on the swithes themselves to eliminate those you dont want or filter in the Visual Syslog App itself which is pretty good (i.e. I supress all messages that include "DHCP" that come from out firewall which acts as a DHCP server).

[n3mmr]

Can you suggest good tutorials that can teach us to understand basic snmp workings? We are absolute novices in snmp.

[Dunky]

Hi,

There are a number of basic introductary tutorials widely availbale on the internet, however I dont think that you really need to understand these in great depth to achieve your goal..

If you are looking to record and see historical events, all you need to do is configure your devices (switches, routers etc.) to send SNMP traps to a NMS.  One thing that is very important though is to ensure that all your devices are using NTP so that the timestamps in the NMS log allow you to see the events in chronological order.

For a basic understanding, look at these...

http://www.snmplink.org/articles/abeginnersguide/

http://www.cisco.com/networkers/nw04/presos/docs/NMS-1N02.pdf

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2012/09/SNMP-INTRODUCTION/

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-snmp-simple-network-management-protocol

Hope that helps,

Steve

[n3mmr]

I think I understand as far as this.

The switches have various capabilities as far as what SNMP queries and what SNMP TRAPs and INFO requests they can handle.

This is defined at manufacturing and/or FW update time.

It is described in MIBs, published with the FW updates.

These MIBs are only actually used by the NMS, and you must load the appropriate MIB or MIBs into the NMS used.

Is this correct??

If so, when I download the MIBs from the FW upgrade site, how do I identify which MIB or MIBs to load into my NMS or MIB browser? This is NOT at all obvious! Browsing using the UnBrowser and a PDF reader I see at least three or four, seemingly mutually exclusive, sets to load into the UnBrowser. 

I have 3Com Baseline Switch 2952-SFP Plus Software version Release 1518P01, Hardware version REV B, i e a V1910 with the latest firmware.

[Dunky]

I'm not really sure what you are trying to acheive.

Most NMS will have all the basic MIBs pre-installed for basic funtionality and I can only think that you would install new releases if there was some new functionality that you needed.  Personally I have never found the need to update any MIBs.