Network Management Systems are the backbone of a modern IT infrastructure. They provide a single pane of glass, that allows for real-time monitoring, proactive problem detection and efficient management of diverse network equipment. However, a common challenge encountered by many organisations is  the lack of native support for newly acquired devices with in their NMS. The unspotted devices may not show up correctly in dashboards, won’t deliver alarms as expected or simply remain invisible to the network operators.

As networks continue to evolve, so does the need for flexible and scalable monitoring. The inability to integrate new devices into an existing NMS can lead to blind spots in visibility and control.

When Your NMS Doesn’t Speak Their Language

Many NMS platforms offer deep, out-of-the-box integration with a wide range of popular vendors and device types. This native support typically involves pre-built MIBs (Management Information Bases), templates, and specific parsing rules that allow the NMS to immediately understand and interpret data from these devices.

However, the reality of network environments is far more diverse. You might encounter:

Legacy hardware: Older devices, still critical to operations, that predate modern NMS integrations or whose manufacturers no longer provide active support.

Niche vendors or specialized equipment: Devices from smaller manufacturers or highly specialised equipment (such as industrial IoT sensors, custom-built hardware) that don’t have the market share to warrant native integration by NMS vendors.

Proprietary systems: Devices with unique communication protocols or data structures that are not openly published or widely adopted.

Newer devices without updated support: Recently released hardware that your NMS vendor hasn’t yet added to its native integration roadmap.

When an NMS lacks native support for a device, it essentially means the system doesn’t “know” how to communicate with it, interpret its status, or gather relevant metrics. This creates a data void, leaving administrators with an incomplete picture of their network’s health.

Consequences of the Unseen Device

The failure to integrate all critical devices into your NMS can have a cascading negative impact on your IT operations:

Blind Spots and Reduced Visibility: Devices operating outside the NMS are invisible. You lose the ability to monitor their performance, availability, or configuration changes in real-time. This means you might not know about an impending failure until it’s too late.

Delayed Problem Resolution: Without automated alerts and centralized logging, troubleshooting issues on unsupported devices becomes a manual, reactive process. This often involves logging into individual devices, sifting through logs, and correlating information across disparate systems, leading to longer Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

Increased Operational Overhead: Manual monitoring and management of non-integrated devices consumes valuable IT staff time that could be better spent on strategic initiatives. This can lead to increased operational costs and a less efficient IT department.

Compliance and Security Risks: An incomplete network inventory makes it harder to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements or security policies. Unmonitored devices can become vulnerabilities, potentially exploited by malicious actors.

Inaccurate Capacity Planning: Without comprehensive data from all network components, it’s difficult to accurately assess resource utilisation and plan for future capacity needs, potentially leading to over-provisioning or under-provisioning.

Lack of Historical Data and Trend Analysis: Native NMS integrations often collect historical data, enabling trend analysis and proactive capacity planning. This critical insight is lost for non-integrated devices, hindering long-term optimisation.

Harnessing the Power of SNMP

Fortunately, a widely adopted solution exists for integrating devices that don’t have native NMS support: SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). SNMP is an application-layer protocol for exchanging management information between network devices. It’s vendor-neutral and designed for remote monitoring and management of network elements.

Here’s how SNMP facilitates integration:

Management Information Base (MIB): At the heart of SNMP is the MIB, which is a hierarchical database of managed objects. Each device that supports SNMP exposes a MIB, describing the variables that can be monitored or configured on that device. These variables are identified by Object Identifiers (OIDs). For example, an OID might represent the CPU utilisation, memory usage, or interface status of a device.

SNMP Agents: Devices capable of being managed via SNMP run an SNMP agent. This agent collects data from the device’s MIB and responds to requests from an NMS.

SNMP Manager (NMS): The NMS acts as the SNMP manager. It sends SNMP requests (like, GET, GETNEXT, GETBULK) to the SNMP agents on devices to retrieve specific data points (OIDs).

SNMP Traps: Devices can also send unsolicited messages called “traps” to the NMS when a significant event occurs (like, a link going down, a critical threshold being breached). This provides a real-time alerting mechanism.

The SGRwin Solution: The Standard Integration Template

SGRwin, as Network Management System (NMS), is built to with flexibility at its core to monitor and manage complex, multi-vendor ecosystems where not every device comes with native support. To address this need, SGRwin includes a powerful feature: the Standard Integration Template.

This integration template provides a structured and efficient way to integrate any SNMP-capable device into the monitoring environment, even when vendor support isn’t available out of the box. Through this feature you can:

• Quickly define custom SNMP OID polling: Easily configure the specific OIDs you want to monitor with an intuitive wizard, that allows you to select specific OIDs, define their data types, and set polling intervals.
• Set up intelligent thresholding and alerting: Set dynamic thresholds on polled values and define alerting logic, ensuring that critical changes or anomalies trigger immediate notifications.
• Parse and interpret complex SNMP traps: Build trap-parsing rules to extract key data from unsolicited SNMP messages and trigger automated actions or alerts based on predefined conditions.
• Centralise data for unified monitoring: All data collected via the standard integration template is brought into the same centralised database as natively integrated devices, allowing for unified dashboards, reporting, and historical analysis.

By providing a flexible and powerful mechanism to leverage SNMP, SGRwin enables organisations to overcome the limitations of proprietary NMS integrations and achieve true end-to-end network visibility. This ensures that every critical device, from legacy hardware to specialised sensors, contributes to a complete and actionable picture of your network’s health.