Table of Contents
Equipment categories
In NAV equipment is classified in categories. The categories are predefined by NAV and cannot be altered. When you add new equipment for NAV to monitor, you classify the equipment according to these categories. There are 7 categories:
| Category | Description | SNMP required? |
|---|---|---|
| GW | A router. Operates on layer 3 (IP layer) | yes |
| GSW | A router and switch in one device. Operates on layer 2 and 3. A given port may configured for switching or for routing. An example is Cisco Catalyst 6500. Note: We only consider it a GSW if it is configured that way. | yes |
| SW | A switch. Operates on layer 2 (mac layer). The SW category was originally intended for core switches that had vlans and trunking. If you prefer all switches may be defined as category SW, also those that are in the EDGE-group, see below. | yes |
| EDGE | Edge switch. Operates on layer 2 (mac layer). EDGE will in NAV be treated equal to SW with one exception: Cricket traffic statistics is not gathered from EDGE switches. If you have problems scaling Cricket to collect data from all switches, use the EDGE categroy | yes |
| WLAN | Wireless equipment, i.e. basestations, wireless bridges. Operates on layer 2 (mac layer). | yes |
| SRV | Servers. Subcategories are frequently used here. | no |
| OTHER | Other equipment. Left over, everything else. I.e. vpn concentrators, terminal servers etc. This equipment is monitored by the status monitor, but NAV does not do any snmp data collection | no |
For five of these categories NAV requires a working SNMP read community. In other words, equipment that fall into these categories must have an active SNMP agent to answer SNMP read queries. This is essential for NAV in order to derive information on router interfaces, switch ports, vlans, prefixes, ARP, CAM and so on.
You may have servers in NAV or OTHER equipment that does not support SNMP. NAV will still status monitor these devices, and detect there place in the topology, but NAV will for instance not do any traffic statistics.
Subcategories
Within a category you may define subcategories. You can define as many subcategories as you like, and a given device may be member of more than one subcategory. For SRV you may for instance define the subcategories mail, web, print etc. A server that is both a web and print server will be member of these two subcategories.
Subcategories serve as a logical way of structuring your equipment. This is useful for documentation purposes, but also i.e. when subscribing to alerts in Alert Profiles. You may for instance only be interested in mail server alarms.
Equipment types
There is also another dimension to classifying equipment and that is in types. Examples of types are Cisco Catalyst 5505 switch, Cisco 3640 router, 3com 1100 switch and so on. A type is a specific product produced by a vendor.
Classification of types is done automatically in NAV, based on the SNMP OID mib2.system.sysObjectId. The match from sysoibjectid to typename is done based on the NAV type table.
A long list of types are predefined in the NAV type table. It is easy to add new types or edit types using Seed Database|Type. When/if you add a new device of an unknown type, NAV will automatically create a new type record with this sysObjectId. You can later edit the type attributes (using Seed Database|Type) to give more meaningful date (type name, description, vendor). See the EquipmentTypes page for more information.
Types are useful when classifying equipments in reports. You may for instance want an overview of all Cisco Catalyst 2950 switches in your network.
