Monitoring Cisco Devices With PRTG – Part 2/3

Originally published on February 11, 2014 by Florian Staffort
Last updated on May 10, 2022 • 9 minute read

In the first part of this blog series, we presented you the first three dedicated sensors PRTG Network Monitor provides to monitor Cisco devices:

  • The Cisco IP SLA sensor, which allows you to monitor the QoS (Quality of Service) in your network,
  • the SNMP Cisco ADSL sensor, which helps you monitor ADSL statistics,
  • and the SNMP Cisco CBQoS (Class Based Quality of Service) sensor to monitor data that includes summery counts and rates by traffic class before and after the enforcement of defined QoS policies.

In this second part, you'll get to know another three dedicated sensors which will improve your monitoring experience with Cisco devices:

 

4. SNMP Cisco ASA VPN Traffic Sensor

 

The SNMP Cisco ASA VPN Traffic sensor helps you monitor the traffic of an Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection on a Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) using SNMP. This PRTG sensor shows incoming and outgoing traffic and is indented to monitor permanent connections. It will show an error if a connection is interrupted.

When adding this sensor type to PRTG, you can automatically create multiple sensors at once for each connection you want to monitor. This functionality makes it very easy and comprehensible for you to set up monitoring for all of your IPsec VPN connections at once-you do not have to accomplish this task individually again and again!

Note: Currently, you can only monitor VPN connections based on IPsec.

 

5. SNMP Cisco ASA VPN Connections Sensor

The SNMP Cisco ASA VPN Connections sensor allows you to monitor the VPN connections on a Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance using SNMP. Via this sensor, PRTG shows you the active sessions of the following connection types:

  • Email
  • IPsec
  • L2L
  • LB
  • SVC
  • WebVPN

It also provides you the total number of:

  • Sessions
  • Active users
  • Groups with active users

You can set thresholds to be notified whenever a certain number of users is reached, or you can get an alarm if one of your permanent lines disconnects unexpectedly.

 

6. SNMP Cisco ASA VPN Users Sensor

Another great functionality comes with the easy-to-use SNMP Cisco ASA VPN Users Sensor: If you want to see at a glance, which of your users are connected to your VPN on an Adaptive Security Appliance, just add this sensor. It will show you the number of connected accounts and display if a user account is currently offline or online. Simple and handy, isn’t it?

 

7. SNMP Cisco System Health Sensor

When it comes to system health, it's important to have a sensor at hand that enables you to get the values you need in a reliable and easily interpretable way. In PRTG, the SNMP Cisco System Health sensor queries the relevant data via SNMP and shows you the following values-and many more, depending on the available components of your device:

  • Percentage CPU load
  • Available memory in absolute and percentage values
  • Status of power supplies
  • Temperatures (in Celsius)
  • Current temperature states

This sensor type has predefined limits for several metrics which can be changed individually in the channel settings. It also uses lookups. This is a clever functionality in PRTG which translates mere status codes returned by your devices into human readable text messages, giving you a clear and unambiguous overview of your devices' conditions.

 

Do you want experience our Cisco sensors yourself?
Download your free trial of PRTG Network Monitor now!

 

The Complete Series

Thanks for monitoring your Cisco devices with PRTG! Stay tuned for part 3 of our blog series, which
will focus on monitoring traffic via NetFlow sensors:

Monitoring Insights Cisco Network