Jalasoft recently updated their network device simulator, which is useful for testing/demo of OpsMgr network monitoring capabilities.
You can download the simulator here:
http://www.jalasoft.com/xian/snmpsimulator
This article will walk through the setup, configuration, and initial monitoring.
You will need a computer or VM (Windows 2003 or above, including Win7 or Win8 apparently). Then, you will need to add multiple IP addresses, one IP address for each device you want to monitor:
In the example above – 10.10.10.20 is the primary IP for my server. Network devices will be simulated on 10.10.10.21 through 10.10.10.25
Run Setup.exe and install the defaults, the Agent Service and Simulator Console.
Provide a service account in order to run the simulator as a service (a new and much needed feature!)
Select the IP address that is the primary IP for the server.
When install is complete – open the Device Simulator console.
Connect to the agent on your primary IP.
Click the + to add a new device.
Lets add a Cisco Router:
On the first secondary IP:
And leave defaults for SNMP (V2 and “public”)
Now lets add additional devices, such as switches, firewalls, etc…
When done – click the Green arrow to save the config.
Next up – we need to give each device a DNS A record so that SCOM can discover it. In AD DNS, create new A records with associated PTR records, and give each device a name:
Once you have added the DNS records in AD – we are ready to discover the devices in SCOM:
Administration > Network Management > Discovery Rules. Run the discovery wizard and discover network devices.
Give the discovery rule a name, choose a management server to run the discovery, and select a resource pool to monitor the network devices
(Hint – you should always create a dedicated resource pool for monitoring network devices, even if you only have a single management server. This allows you to scale these out to dedicated servers in the future without making any other changes)
Choose Explicit discovery.
Create a Run As account for the “public” SNMP community string. Select it:
Add in each device and select the appropriate community string Run As account:
Then choose to run the discovery manually:
And click “Create”, and leave the box checked to “Run the network discovery rule”
In the console – you can see the discovery rule and the status:
In the event log of the management server that runs the discovery – you will soon see network discovery events:
Once this is complete – you should see the network devices in the console views:
You can run Health Explorer and view the out-of-the-box monitoring:
Or look at the network node and summary dashboards to view summary and historical data
