OMS Network Performance Monitor #MSOMS #NPM #Azure

When Using OMS you can benefit of the Network Performance Monitor (NPM), that helps you perform near real-time monitoring of network performance parameters (such as packet loss and network latency) and localize network faults. It not only detects network performance issues, but it also localizes the source of the problem to a particular network segment or device to make it easy for you to locate and fix a network performance issue.

You can detect network issues with the solution dashboard which displays summarized information about your network including recent network health events, unhealthy network links, and subnetwork links that are facing high packet loss and latency. You can drill-down into a network link to view the current health status of subnetwork links as well as node-to-node links.

So what to do to get the full benefit of the NPM.

Deploying NPM involves four basic steps.
1. Enabling the solution on your OMS workspace
2. Installing the OMS agents
3. Configuring the OMS agents
4. Configuring the solution.

I Assume you already have the OMS Agent in place and connected and reporting to OMS,if not below are two screens on how to enable the NPM and installing the Agent. And a lot of cool new features are there.

Installing the OMS agent Windows Or Linux.

 

Firewall ports are required to be opened on the servers so that the agents can connect to each other.

Run the script without any parameters in a power shell window with administrative privileges. This script creates few registry keys required by NPM and creates windows firewall rules to allow agents to create TCP connections with each other

The port opened by default would be 8084. You have the option of using a custom port by providing the parameter ‘portNumber’ to the script. However, the same port should be used on all the machines where the script is executed.

Note that the script will configure only windows firewall locally. If you have a network firewall you should make sure that it is allowing traffic destined for the TCP port being used by NPM

OMS Network Performance Monitor Agent Configuration Script

Now that the solution is enabled we can configure some networks. All the networks are discovered by the Agent and it will turn-up automatically.

 

You can Add a new network ( read this as a Name ) as we give the IP subnet a name and link the subnet to the network

Give the network a name and link the subnet to It

And don’t forget to save the network. now that the networks have names it is easier to understand the networks.

When looking at the nodes you can easily see what networks the machine is using

The monitoring of the networks

If you don’t want to monitor Certain networks you can disable the monitoring of this network.

 

Set monitoring rules

Network Performance Monitor generates health events about the connectivity between a pair of nodes or subnetwork or network links when a threshold is breached. These thresholds can be learned automatically by the system or you can configure them custom alert rules.

The Default rule is created by the system and it creates a health event whenever loss or latency between any pair of networks or subnetwork links breaches the system-learned threshold. You can choose to disable the default rule and create custom monitoring rules

In the monitoring rules you can create a special rule set say for the SQL server , Webservers or DMZ / ISCSI networks with each a set of his own rules.

With all this in place and when things are running you may need to tweak the thresholds a bit.

There a great in depth overviews and you can adjust them to drip down.

Normally this is not the best view for a network but this is a test lab and machines are not always running.

Topology Dashboard

If you click the View topology map link, you will see the hop-by-hop topology of the routes between the source and destination nodes. The unhealthy routes or hops will be colored in red, which will help you to quickly localize the problem to a particular section of the network.

 

And if you want to get more detail about your network drill down and adjust the time setting from 7 days to 6 hours

to get a Daily overview with OMS Network Performance Monitor with the data based on 6 hours

Get a good view of the latency of your network between servers/ HOP’s

Log Analytics search

All data that is exposed graphically through the Network Performance Monitor dashboard and drill-down pages is also available natively in Log Analytics search. You can query the data using the search query language and create custom reports by exporting the data to Excel or PowerBI. The Common Queries blade in the dashboard has some useful queries that you can use as the starting point for creating your own queries and reports.

More and more new OMS features are coming so I guess the data Size is still Growing

 

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