use CMG/HSG as monitoring probe

When CMG or HSG are deployed as gateways (either CMG or HSG), they can be doubled as mfusion monitoring probe to monitor internal network devices.

The objective of doubling up CMG/HSG as monitoring probe is to save cost for implementing dedicated monitoring/NMS system within customer networks to monitor internal network devices, and provide a real-time dashboard to provide full visibility on the end-to-end infrastructure availability status. This is particularly useful if the sites are small, and customers are already using CMG/HSG gateway for each site.

Traditionally, in order to remotely monitor customer internal network devices, some providers require each site to built a tunnel back to NOC monitoring system, or require customer site firewall to open ports to allow inbound access from the NOC NMS to probe internal devices. Either approach is insecure, difficult to implement and maintain. Doubling CMG/HSG as probes eliminates all these problems and allows seamless deployment.

In above topology:

  1. the internal devices can be any IP-based devices, or SNMP-based devices, in customer local area network (LAN). ICMP monitoring only checks device up/down status, SNMP monitoring can check utilization eg. port bandwidth, cpu/ram usage, AP client counts, and many standard snmp matrix.
  2. HSG/CMG will function as the intended gateway, and at the same time enabled as a mfusion probe, so that it receives configurations (monitoring instructions) from mfusion, "probes"/monitors internal devices on-behalf of cloud mfusion, and forwards collected data back to mfusion in real-time.
  3. mfusion is the shared multi-tenant cloud monitoring platform which receives and stores all monitoring data, alarms & alerts for faults, and provides portal dashboard access for customers to retrieve real-time status of the network and generate historical reports etc.

Monitoring Provisioning Steps

1. Provision CMG/HSG as a standard host, so that we can monitor and manage it, just like a normal gateway.

2. Provision CMG/HSG as a monitoring probe, so that it will help to monitor internal devices on-behalf of cloud mfusion. Note we are adding another mfusion host here, but use the host name as "probe-HOSTMAC", and select host type as "mfusion proxy".

3. Provision internal host for monitoring.

Once the provisioning is done, you can go to mfusion dashboard to view the monitoring results.

Verification steps:

  1. make sure the CMG/HSG can already ping (or snmpwalk) to the internal devices which are to be monitored
  2. start "mfusion probe" service via CLI, check all probe services must be running. eg.

CMG# show mfusion probe

mFusion probe: running

Database Access: YES