Summary: Learn how to use OMS Network Performance Monitor to monitor near real-time performance of on-premises, cloud (IaaS), and hybrid networks.
Hello, this is Abhave Sharma, and today I want to talk about how Network Performance Monitor addresses a major challenge, that is, the many monitoring tools for the multitude of network environments that organizations face when they monitor their networks.
IT organizations are being asked to enable innovation while they limit risk—not an easy task. One answer to this dilemma is to use public cloud services for the more innovative and risky projects. As more organizations turn to the public cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have emerged as clear leaders. Yet, the majority of organizations don’t have all of their workloads in a public cloud. In fact, they typically have only a subset of infrastructure delivered out of public cloud environments. This leaves many organizations with a monitoring nightmare: monitor instances that rely on a multitude of technologies, from a multitude of sources (on-premises, cloud, and hybrid), with a multitude of tools that provide limited visibility. What’s an IT department to do?
Simple. Use a hybrid IT monitoring tool that doesn’t just monitor public cloud or a subset of on-premises technologies, but monitors all of your technologies whether on premises and off premises. It must monitor important network parameters, be easy enough to use, and provide problem detection and granular detail to drive root cause analysis.
OMS Network Performance Monitor for different environments
OMS Network Performance Monitor offers near real-time monitoring of network performance parameters, such as loss and latency, and works across on-premises, cloud (IaaS), and hybrid environments. Network Performance Monitor uses synthetic transactions as a primary mechanism to detect and locate network performance bottlenecks. The solution detects IPv4 and IPv6 subnets that are directly connected to the physical machines or virtual machines on which the OMS agent has been installed and uploads this information to OMS.
It not only helps you with timely detection of network problems, but it also localizes the source of the problem to a particular network segment or device. Network Performance Monitor generates alerts as and when a threshold has been breached for a network link. These thresholds can be learned automatically by the system (ideal-state) or can be configured by the administrator by using custom alert rules.
For more information about the capabilities of the solution, see Network Performance Monitor (Preview) solution in OMS and read the introductory blog post, Introducing OMS Network Performance Monitor.
How to use Network Performance Monitor for monitoring different network environments
Install and configure OMS agents on the physical machines or virtual machines (on-premises, private, public, or hybrid cloud) between which the performance is to be monitored. Use the basic processes to install OMS agents at Connect Windows computers to Log Analytics and Connect Operations Manager to Log Analytics.
You’ll need to install at least two agents to have enough data to discover and monitor your network resources. After you’ve installed the agents, open firewall ports for those computers to ensure that the agents can communicate. You need to download and then run the EnableRules.ps1 PowerShell script without any parameters in a PowerShell window with administrative privileges.
For more information about how to set up the solution, see Installing and configuring agents for the solution.
Network Performance Monitor can be used for the following different network environments:
On-premises to on-premises: If the customer network consists of several subnets, one OMS agent should be installed in each. They all use the same port to establish a direct connection to each other. The individual probe is recognized and authenticated via unique identifiers to ensure that only authorized probes may establish a connection.
Multiple locations: A company that has a distributed infrastructure can monitor the connectivity of the branch offices even if they are behind firewalls in their own networks. This requires installation of one OMS agent in each subnet of each branch office. The company’s available network connections are used for the connection between the branch offices and the headquarters, for example, this could be an existing VPN connection.
Virtual networks and on-premises: Network Performance Monitor can monitor connectivity between the virtual networks (including Azure Virtual Network and AWS Virtual Private Cloud) and on-premises networks. VPN Gateway will be required to send network traffic between virtual networks and on-premises locations. It is used for Site-to-Site, Point-to-Site, and dedicated private connections:
Site-to-Site: This type of connection requires a VPN device located on-premises that has a public IP address assigned to it and is not located behind a NAT.
Multi-Site: When working with multiple connections, you must use a route-based VPN type. Because a virtual network can have only one virtual network gateway, all connections through the gateway share the available bandwidth.
Point-to-Site: This is a useful solution when you want to connect to your virtual network from a remote location, such as from home or a conference, or when you only have a few clients who need to connect to a virtual network. Point-to-Site connections do not require a VPN device or a public-facing IP address to work. You establish the VPN connection by starting it from the client computer.
Virtual network-to-Virtual network: Monitoring the network performance of a virtual network to another virtual network, such as Azure Virtual Network-to-Azure Virtual Network or AWS Virtual Private Cloud-to-AWS Virtual Private Cloud, is similar to monitoring the performance of a virtual network to an on-premises site location. Both connectivity types use a VPN gateway to provide a secure tunnel. The virtual networks that you monitor can be:
In the same or different regions
In the same or different subscriptions
In the same or different deployment models
Note: Please note that the individual hops in the VPN tunnel between the two end nodes will not be detected by the solution.
Within a virtual network: At least two OMS agents should be installed in the virtual network within which connectivity is to be monitored. The agents establish a direct connection to each other without the need of a VPN connection between them.
Note: Please ensure that the applicable security groups in the virtual network do not contain any access control list (ACL) rules that deny network traffic to the virtual machine instances that you want to monitor in a virtual network.
That is all I have for you today. Join me next time when I talk about what’s coming next with the Network Performance Monitor in OMS.
For more information on this new solution, please visit the Operations Management Suite documentation webpage or sign up for a free trial. Follow us on Twitter @MSCloudMgmt.
Abhave Sharma
Program Manager, Microsoft Operations Management Team