Network Device Monitoring

Monitor routers, switches, firewalls, and any SNMP-enabled device in your network. Track availability, response time, interfaces, system metrics, and configuration changes from a single view.

Overview

Cloudmon uses SNMP to monitor network devices, collecting availability, performance, interface, and system metric data at regular polling intervals. Any device that supports SNMP can be monitored, including routers, switches, firewalls, wireless controllers, printers, and IoT devices. Navigate to Network → Network Device to view all monitored devices.

The device list gives an immediate picture of the environment: total devices, down count, critical count, and the number of devices enabled for Netflow, NCM, Syslog, and SNMP Traps. Distribution charts break the fleet down by state, vendor, and category, and a Top 5 by Response Time chart highlights the slowest-responding devices.

Prerequisites

Before adding a network device to Cloudmon, confirm the following requirements are met:

Adding a Network Device

To add a device, navigate to Network → Network Device and select Add. The Add/Edit panel is organized into three sections: Monitor Details, Configuration Details, and Alert Settings.

Monitor Details: basic identification details for this device.

Configuration Details: interval, templates, dependencies, and settings.

Alert Settings: configure alarm rules, user groups, and third party services.

Click Save. Cloudmon will begin polling the device immediately.

Note: To enable monitoring for interfaces, navigate to the device's Interfaces tab.

What Cloudmon Monitors

Each device has a detailed view showing availability, downtime count, and response time in the summary header, alongside device information including system name, description, vendor, model, and SysObjectID. The side panel shows the assigned probe, credential, groups, boot time, first seen, last polled timestamps, and current status.

The Interfaces section provides full visibility into every interface on the device, with a colour-coded Port View for instant status summary and a table listing each interface with its IP, MAC, speed, TX rate, RX rate, TX and RX utilisation, and operational state. Use the Discover Interfaces action to automatically enumerate all interfaces on the device.

The System Metrics section surfaces SNMP-collected metrics specific to the device type, such as CPU utilisation, memory usage, and disk. The Network Interfaces list page under Network → Network Interfaces provides a cross-device view of every interface across all monitored devices. Additional tabs per device include Netflow, Syslog, Traps, NCM, Alarms, Events, and Outages.

Adding Custom SNMP Metrics

In addition to the metrics automatically collected from the assigned monitoring template, you can add your own custom SNMP metric directly from the device's System Metrics tab. This is useful for vendor-specific OIDs that are not covered by the standard template, such as consumable levels on a printer or a vendor-specific health counter.

1. Navigate to the device's System Metrics tab and click Add.
2. Enter a Display Name for the metric.
3. Select the Type, such as Scalar, that matches the OID being added.
4. Enter the OID for the metric. Click Query to verify the OID returns a value from the device before saving.
5. Optionally enter a Unit to label the values returned, such as "%" or "pages".
6. Click Save. The custom metric appears in the System Metrics list alongside the template-defined metrics and can be charted, polled on demand using Poll now, and alarmed on like any other metric.

Interface Monitoring

Cloudmon automatically discovers all interfaces on an SNMP-monitored network device and lists them under the Interfaces tab of the device detail page. For each discovered interface, Cloudmon can track traffic utilisation (inbound and outbound), packet transmission and reception, and traffic loss or error rates. Unlike system metrics which are monitored automatically, interface monitoring on SNMP devices must be enabled individually for each interface before data collection begins.

Enabling Interface Monitoring

1. Navigate to Network → Network Devices and click the device you want to configure.
2. Open the Interfaces tab. A list of all discovered interfaces on the device is displayed.
3. Locate the interface you want to monitor and toggle the monitoring switch on. Repeat for each interface you want to track.
4. Once enabled, Cloudmon begins collecting traffic and error metrics for that interface at the next polling cycle.

To discover interfaces that were added to the device after it was first monitored, click the Discover Interfaces button in the Interfaces tab. Cloudmon will scan the device and populate any newly detected interfaces into the list.

Disabling Interface Monitoring

To stop collecting data for a specific interface, navigate to Network → Network Devices → [Select Device] → Interfaces and toggle the monitoring switch off for that interface. Disabling monitoring does not delete historical data already collected for that interface.

Setting Alarms on Interfaces

Alarms can be configured on any monitored interface metric directly from the Interfaces tab. Click the alarm icon next to the interface you want to alarm on. The Add Alarm panel opens, allowing you to configure a trigger on Interface State, Transmit Rate, or Receive Rate.

Bandwidth Configuration and Utilization Alerts

For accurate utilization percentage calculation, Cloudmon needs to know the maximum bandwidth capacity of each monitored interface. By default, Cloudmon reads the interface speed from the device via SNMP. You can override this value if the reported speed is incorrect or if you want to alert based on a custom threshold (for example, alerting when utilization exceeds 80% of a committed information rate rather than the physical link speed).

To configure bandwidth settings for an interface:

1. Navigate to Network → Network Devices and select the device.
2. Open the Interfaces tab.
3. Locate the interface and click the edit icon in the Actions column.
4. In the Edit Interface panel, you can specify custom Tx Bandwidth (Mbps) and Rx Bandwidth (Mbps) values separately. Cloudmon uses these values to calculate transmit and receive utilization percentage independently, which is useful for asymmetric links where upload and download capacity differ.
5. Click Save to apply the bandwidth configuration.

Once bandwidth is configured, you can set utilization-based alarms directly from the Interfaces tab. Click the alarm icon next to an interface and configure triggers on Transmit Utilization Percentage or Receive Utilization Percentage. For example, set a Critical alarm when transmit utilization exceeds 80% for two consecutive polling intervals. These alarms help proactively identify interfaces approaching saturation before they cause packet loss or performance degradation.

Bulk Interface Actions

When managing devices with many interfaces, you can perform actions on multiple interfaces simultaneously. Select the checkboxes next to the interfaces you want to act on, then click the settings icon next to the selection count. The following bulk actions are available:

Bulk Device Actions

When managing large numbers of monitored devices, you can perform actions on multiple devices simultaneously. Select the checkboxes next to the devices you want to act on, then click the settings icon next to the selection count. The following bulk actions are available:

Selecting Edit opens the Edit Network Devices panel. The Selected Network Devices section lists every monitor included in the bulk edit, and the remaining sections set values that are applied across all of them.

Note: Interface monitoring cannot be enabled from the bulk edit panel. To enable monitoring for interfaces, navigate to the Interfaces tab on the individual device.

Alarms

Alarm triggers can be configured per device to alert on a range of conditions. Common alarm triggers for network devices include:

• Device availability is going down
• Response time exceeding a defined threshold
• Interface operational state changes, such as a port going down
• System metrics such as CPU utilisation or memory usage crossing a threshold, including any custom SNMP metric you have added

To attach an alarm rule to a device, open the device's Edit panel and select the desired profile from the Alarm Rule field under Alert Settings. The User Groups and Third Party Service assigned in the same section are inherited automatically by the attached alarm rule. Syslog, SNMP Traps, and Netflow can also be enabled per device from the device settings, allowing Cloudmon to receive and correlate log messages, trap notifications, and traffic flow data alongside the standard polling data. Learn more.

Troubleshooting