In keeping with the tough times, Futuregen is offering a promotion on its Global Network Monitoring Service. The benefits are explained on a previous article on Global Network Monitoring Service.
Our service works by polling (talking to) your network devices every 5 minutes using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). SNMP gathers data about your device and stores it in our Database. This enables us to do baseline analysis on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis.
Some of the most common causes of downtimes that we can identify and notify include:
– Lease Line disruptions and bit errors
– Network Routing Issues
– Abnormal resource utilization for bandwidth, cpu, memory, disk usage
The details of the promotions are as follows:
1. Affordable per device pricing.
You can avail of the service by enrolling as little as one device (router, server or switch) to our service. The Per Device Per month fee is only 135 SGD.
2. Device attributes monitored:
Each device that is enrolled in the promo will have its cpu, memory, and bandwidth monitored.
For SNMP enabled servers, we can also monitor the disk usage and create alerts if these get past 80% utilized.
For routers with upstream links, we also monitor the bit error rates and create alerts for situations where the line quality deteriorates–even before users feel the ‘sluggishness’ of the line.
3. Notification within 10 minutes
When a device or link goes down, our service level agreement is to contact you or your designated officer to inform you of the event. This proactive alert enables you to accelerate the recovery from downtimes.
The following optional service/deliverables can be added:
1. Syslog server..where network or device events can be posted automatically for review (10 SGD per device per month)
2. Graphs and charts for executive briefing (15 SGD per report)
To enroll in the program, kindly email marketing[at]futuregen.sg. Related documents: Network Offering Brochure Scope of Work , Network Device Details Form
How about SNMP compromising my Networks security?
This is a good and valid question as a lot of exploits made by hackers have been around the SNMP vulnerability.
We will address the 2 top weakness of SNMP:
1. The well known default SNMP community strings of [public] and [private] are being used to hack into network devices once SNMP is enabled on these.
2. SNMP is vulnerable to brute force password guessing. Once the SNMP community string is known, the network is compromised.
So how do we address problem #1? Simply put, we advise our clients to NOT use the default community strings. We ask them to come up with random strings of at least 9 characters. This will help resolve this issue.
How do we address problem #2? We put in an additional access control list that limits the internet from accessing your network device’ snmp. You allow only SNMP coming from our SNMP poller’s IP address. This effectively blocks out hackers that try to guess your SnMP strings.