Design and implementation of an SNMP based data collector that will aid in the design of a multi-vendor network monitoring system.

Abstract

As network operators in Zimbabwe continue to grow their networks every day, network monitoring is also becoming one of their most challenging issues. The operators use network equipment supplied by different vendors and therefore the monitoring tools that they are currently using are also vendor-specific. Due to the large costs associated with monitoring tools and licenses, many network elements are still being monitored manually which becomes practically impossible as networks grow in size and complexity. Besides purchasing monitoring tools from equipment vendors, some of the solutions implemented by administrators locally include the use of free online ping and traceroute tools. While such solutions can work for a small number of nodes in a single geographical location, they fail to scale to bigger and complex network infrastructures. Purchasing monitoring tools require foreign currency and therefore it creates more overheads and expenses to the company resulting in low returns of investments. This research feels the gap and provides an efficient multi-vendor networking system. SNMP protocol was used to build a data acquisition layer of the tool. It is in this layer where fault information is collected from network elements and delivered to the main application for processing, storage, and dashboard display. The data collection layer was designed to query in real-time, the Network Elements‟ online/offline status, interface connection status, Linkup/link-down status, and link performance utilization. A combination of three switches from different vendors (Huawei, ZTE and Cisco) was used to come up with a prototype network for testing and validating the results.