Considerations when Designing a Management Group for Network Monitoring
Updated: May 13, 2016
Applies To: System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager, System Center 2012 - Operations Manager, System Center 2012 SP1 - Operations Manager
System Center 2012 – Operations Manager provides the ability to discover and monitor network routers and switches, including the network interfaces and ports on those devices and the virtual LAN (VLAN) that they participate in. You can also delete discovered network devices and prevent the deleted network devices from being rediscovered the next time discovery runs. For more information, see Monitoring Networks by Using Operations Manager.
Resource Pools
Network monitoring in System Center 2012 – Operations Manager requires its own separate resource pool.
Create a resource pool dedicated to network management; add dedicated management servers into the newly created resource pool, then remove the dedicated management server from any other resource pool.
Each management server or gateway server can run only one discovery rule. You specify a single management server or gateway server to run the discovery rule and a management server resource pool to perform the actual monitoring of the network devices.
If you create discovery rules on multiple management servers, you should create a management pool for each and make sure that each discovery defines a different set of devices. If a single device is managed in different pools, it will not be able to be deleted.
For more information see How to Discover Network Devices in Operations Manager and Network Device Discovery Settings.
Performance and Scale
Because network monitoring workflows run on management servers (on the SNMP module), and not on agents, a heavy load is placed on the management servers. Therefore for better performance we recommend using dedicated management servers in dedicated resource pools for network monitoring.
For more information see the Operations Manager Sizing Helper.
Network Device Accessibility
Network devices must be accessible by the management servers during monitoring.
Any firewalls between the management servers and the devices must be considered in planning, and when setting up dedicated resource pools.
Gateway servers are supported for use in managing network devices, but the gateway server must be in its own resource pool, and not in the same pool as the devices.
Upgrade
If you were monitoring network devices in Operations Manager 2007 R2 and are upgrading toSystem Center 2012 – Operations Manager, the network monitoring you were performing will still function properly. But if you want to take advantage of the additional monitoring capabilities available when upgrading, you will need to rerun network device discovery. However, you must also upgrade any appropriate management packs. See Monitoring Networks by Using Operations Manager for more information. If upgrading management packs is not an option, then do not rerun discovery: continue to operate under the original management packs and the original network monitoring capabilities you had under Operations Manager 2007 R2.