Introduction to ICMP ping availability monitoring and traceroute

Entuity enables you to monitor the availability of the managed objects in your network. Users with Administrator permissions can set up and maintain the IP addresses used with availability monitoring.

Entuity builds of a list of IP addresses on which to gather availability data every 10 minutes, using applicationMonitor. This list defines the end destinations for all traceroute and ping operations within each 10 minute polling cycle.

The list:

• is built from the list of devices under the Entuity server's management, converting host names to IP addresses.
• is built from the list of IP addresses associated with ports, but ignoring IP addresses with a status of administratively down. Layer 2 switches do not have IP addresses associated with their ports.
• is built from the list of all IP addresses associated with managed devices. This includes IP addresses that are not mapped to ports.
• excludes IP addresses of ports that are unmanaged.
• excludes IP addresses on more than one device.

applicationMonitor then reads this IP address polling list. The list is polled with traceroute every 2 minutes. By default, Entuity availability monitoring pings an IP address, waits 3 seconds for a response and - if a response is not returned - sends another ICMP Ping Echo request to the same address.

Entuity will ping a non-responding address up to 3 times before determining the address is not reachable.

This traceroute data is displayed on the Traceroute dashlet, which can be found on the Traceroute dashboard. The traceroute data is displayed as follows:

• a table detailing the traceroute path from the Entuity server to the selected device.
• a graph showing the reachability history for each selected IP address, reporting the following metrics:
  • True Cause ICMP Failure (%) - number of times traceroute failed to reach the IP address, when that address was the true cause of the problem, as a percentage of the number of times traceroute attempted to poll the IP address.
  • Reachability ICMP Failures (%) - number of times traceroute failed to reach the IP address, as a percentage of the number of times traceroute attempted to poll the device.

Please see this article for help and information on possible network availability issues.