Identify Issues with a Two Session Network Monitoring Setup

This documentation article is the second part of the Onboarding Tutorials. This article is following the part 1, Getting Started, and will start exactly where the first part left. To successfully complete this tutorial, we expect that you have already two agents installed in your Obkio Account.

Throughout this article, there are links to more detailed articles that explain how things work in greater detail. You don't need to follow and read all these articles to finish this tutorial as they are listed only as references for later.

The goal of this tutorial is to introduce agent groups, understand how they can help with the network monitoring templates, and learn how to leverage a second monitoring agent to locate a network issue.

Agent Groups are a collection of monitoring agents used inside the App to ease the configuration of things such as network monitoring templates.

So before we continue, let's create two agent groups and assign the monitoring agent to them:

1. Visit the Groups Menu to manage your groups (Menu -> Groups).
2. For this tutorial, create the groups Public Clouds and Business Agents.
3. Assign the Public Monitoring Agent created in the previous tutorial: Public -> Public Clouds
4. Assign the Software Agent created in the previous tutorial:Software -> Business Agents

It's now time to leverage the power of the agent groups in the Network Monitoring Template that we created in the previous tutorial.

As a quick reminder, in the network monitoring templates, there are two lists of monitoring agents and/or agent groups. In the previous tutorial, we configured two monitoring agents each in the two lists and it created a Network Monitoring Session between the two monitoring agents.

1. Replace the two monitoring agents by the agent groups that we just created.
2. In the background, the systems will create a session between each monitoring agent in the first list (or in the agent groups in the first list) with all the monitoring agents in the second list (or in the agent groups in the second list).

As you can imagine, now that the network monitoring templates are using agent groups, there is no need to modify them by hand each time we create a new monitoring agent in the account.

It's now time to leverage the changes we just made and create a second Public Monitoring Agent. With this second public monitoring agent, when a network monitoring session is reporting issues, such as higher latency, jitter or packet loss, it will be much easier to know if the issues are caused by something next to your local software agent or in the cloud.

The creation of the second public monitoring agent is similar to the first one we created in the previous template with one exception:

1. Click on Agents in the left menu
2. Click on the Create new agent button in the middle of the screen. You are now in the agent type selection screen.
3. For this tutorial, select Public then Next.
4. Select a public monitoring agent of your choice (ex: at AWS or Azure).
5. Then click on Next.
6. Now it's time to give the agent a name. Let's call it Public 2.
7. Add our new agent Public 2 to the agent group we created called Public Clouds.
8. click Create.

A new network monitoring session will now be created between the agent Public 2 and the agent Software.

With this new network monitoring setup with three monitoring agents, it's time to take a look at the Chord Diagram. This diagram is a representation of the current status of all the monitoring agents and all the network monitoring sessions.

You can find the monitoring agents located at the outside of the diagram and the network monitoring sessions inside the diagram, connecting the monitoring agents.

1. Click on a Monitoring Agent you want to analyze.
2. The list of the network monitoring sessions will appear on the right side of the diagram.
3. Click on the Agent Name of your choice to be redirected to it's page. The same thing applies to the network monitoring sessions.

There is also the Dynamic Dashboard icon which appears next to the Sessions title that will open a dynamic dashboard when clicking on it.

The dynamic dashboard, which has just opened, represents the two network monitoring sessions with the agent Software. Similar to the session page, there is a time range available at the top right to navigate.

Consult the Dashboard:

With this dashboard, we can see clearly the network performance of both network monitoring sessions at the same time and instantly figure out if they were both affected by the network issue.

Analyze the results:

• If both network sessions were affected, the network issue is probably closer to the Software monitoring agent. For example, the issue can be the local firewall or the Internet connection.

• Inversely, if only one session is affected, the problem is probably not in the firewall or the local Internet connection. It may be located inside the ISP's network or in the Cloud network.

Use troubleshooting tools:

Troubleshoot with tools such as the Network Device Monitoring and the Traceroutes to pinpoint the network issue with more accuracy.

With this tutorial, you were able to create Agent Groups and learn how to leverage the Agent Groups with Monitoring Templates. With multiple agents and monitoring sessions in your account, you were able to start collecting valuable network performance data.

You've learned how to view the status of your agents and monitoring session in Obkio's Chord Diagram and learned how to open a Dynamic Dashboard. Finally, you learned how to locate a network issue with the two monitoring sessions that you created.

At this point, you've started to collect valuable information about issues affecting your network performance. You can now start troubleshooting network problems using tools like Network Device Monitoring and Traceroutes.

You should also continue on to Getting Started Part 3: Scaling Up with Private Network Monitoring to learn about agent networks and agent modes, and learn how to leverage Obkio Network Monitoring to monitor between private locations such as branch offices, data centers, private clouds or remote users over VPN.