This thursday, at Microsoft Teched North America 2011, Rob Kuehfus and myself will be presenting a breakout session (SIM354) on System Center Operations Manager 2012 network monitoring. Network monitoring is one of the new features that Microsoft is putting into System Center Operations Manager 2012. So what are the new features that we’re introducing?

• Out of the box discovery, monitoring, and reporting
• Server to network dependency discovery
• Multi-vendor support
• Multi protocol support
• SNMPv1/v2c/v3
• IPv4 and IPv6
• Robust platform for partners to build on

The first step to get monitoring working is to run the Discovery Wizard (the process of identifying network devices to be monitored). The network monitoring bits have been re-written from the ground up, so although the Discovery Wizards looks somewhat similar it actually allows you to use all these new features such as SNMP v3 and IPv6 support. So what is acutally discovered? (more)

• Connectivity
• VLAN membership
• HSRP groups
• Stitching of switch ports to server NICs
• Key components of a device
• Port/Interface
• Processor
• Memory

The new discovery process has three stages: (1) Probing, (2) Processing and (3) Post Processing. It has two modes: Explicit and Recursive (using ARP, IP or Topology MIB).

The discovery works only on Gateway/Management Server and has a single rule per Gateway/Management Server. The discovery runs on a scheduled basis or on demand.

One nice new feature is that we can do “limited discoveries” which can be triggered by device traps from certain device vendors, such as Cisco!

Once your device gets discovered, what do we actually monitor? Out of the box you get:

• Port/Interface
  • Up/Down (operational & admin status)
  • Volumes of inbound/outbound traffic
  • % Utilization
  • Drop & Broadcast rates
• Processor
  • % Utilization
• Memory
  • In depth memory counters (Cisco Only)
  • Free memory

Other than those, we will monitor Connection Health (based on looking at both ends of a connection), VLAN Health (based on health state of switches in VLAN) and HSRP Group (based on health state of individual HSRP end points).

As you might have heard, System Center Operations Manager 2012 is introducing the concept of “pools” (which we’ll talk about in a later blogpost). Network Monitoring supports these pools of management servers. So what else is cool? Well:

Only certain ports will be monitored by default! These will be ports connecting two network devices to each other or ports to which managed server is connected.

Ofcourse, users can enable monitoring for other ports if above is not sufficient.

In System Center Operations Manager 2012 we’re also introducing the concept of “dashboards” (which again I’ll talk about in a later blogpost).

Network monitoring has four dashboards out of the box:

• Network Summary
• Network Node
• Network Interface
• Vicinity

And ofcourse it’s going to provide out of the box reports: Memory Utilization, Processor Utilization, Port Traffic Volume, Port Error Analysis and Port Packet Analysis.

Stay tuned for more blogposts on System Center Operations Manager 2012!