Release Notes for the Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor Release 1.0

These release notes contain the following information for the Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor also known as the Altiga Monitoring Station (AMS):

Overview

The Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor is a standalone Java based application that polls information from multiple Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrators and displays it in a graphical format.

Note The Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor monitors only Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrators; it does not replace an existing network management system.

With the Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor, you can view:

Top-level status of all Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrators in a network on one screen called the VPN Concentrator Network - Summary screen.
Detailed status for individual Cisco devices in the network.
Trends over time, for example, amount of throughput over a three month period on a selected device.
Thresholds for numbers of users, CPU utilization, and throughput.

With the Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor, you can:

Send e-mail notifications to network administrators when thresholds have been exceeded.
Launch the VPN Concentrator Manager to manage a selected device.

The Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor also provides answers to the following common questions:

Are any Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrators in the network exceeding any thresholds?
Which Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator in the network is a specific user on?
Who are the top five users who have been on a Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator the longest?
Who are the top five users generating the most data through a selected Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator?
How many packets per second are moving through a selected Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator?

Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor uses the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMPv1) to poll Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrators in a network and gather information (statistics and traps) from the Management Information Base, version 2 (MIB-II) and the Enterprise MIB. It then displays this information on a continuous basis by automatically refreshing the display each time it polls the devices.

Note To monitor a Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator with the Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor, you must first configure an SNMP Community string in the Concentrator. To configure an SNMP Community string in the Concentrator, go to: Configuration > System > Management Protocols > SNMP Communities > Add.

Documentation Updates

The following Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor features are not listed in the User Guide:

To delete a specific trap in the Global Trap Listing box on the Summary screen, highlight the trap and click the right mouse button, then select Clear Selected Event.
Use the Setup General tab to specify a maximum of 5000 users for warning and alert thresholds. To automatically increase or decrease users, place the cursor on one of the arrows and hold down the left mouse button.

Known Problems

Known problems are defined as unexpected behaviors. The known problems for the Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor are:

Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor requires Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator 2.1.3 or later to receive traps over a LAN-to-LAN connection.
Login Time in the Top 5 Users list may show the time off by a few minutes or seconds when compared with the HTML interface's Top 10 Users screen.
The username field in the Top 5 Users list is not wide enough for long usernames.
SMTP Server and Email Recipient columns may not be wide enough for long names.
When you first change the time period in the Graphs view from day to week, month, or three months, it can take some time for Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor to read all the data. Depending on the size of the data file, Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor takes approximately three minutes per megabyte of data to read and chart the new data. For example, it takes approximately 15 minutes to load 5MB data file. However, once Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor has read in the data, you will not experience delay when you change the time period.
If you send less than 1000 bytes per second over a connection, the Top 5 Users - Throughput table shows zero Kb.
Select custom graphs only when you first install the Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor. If you change the custom graph later to poll different data, Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor does not purge the old data, and the old data gets mixed with the new data.
Once you specify a path for your browser on the General tab, you can modify the path, but you cannot delete it. To delete it, edit the BrowserPath field in the amsCfg.cfg file.
When you exit from Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor on Win95 or 98, the Java Runtime environment window does not close automatically.
You should limit Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator device names to 30 characters or less. The Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor truncates longer names in the data and trap files (amsData.bck and amsTraps.bck).
If a Java runtime exception error occurs in the Java Runtime environment window, you must exit the Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor and restart. You might want to save the text of the exception error into a separate file and email it to the Cisco support personnel.
When you are setting trap destinations on a Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator for sending traps to the Cisco VPN 3000 Monitor, you should configure only SNMPv1 as the SNMP version on the Configuration > System > Events > Trap Destinations > Add/Modify screen.
To find a PPTP user via the Find User feature, you must include the domain name as well as the user name. The syntax is DOMAINNAME/username. For example, to find Bjones in the OMEGA domain, you would enter OMEGA/Bjones.

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