Extending and Customizing

You can customize NetCrunch to suit your needs. Consider adding more MIBs and counters, creating views, and incorporating new device types, node fields, and node icons. Think about adding new background images for views, modifying notification message formats, defining new calculated counters, extending the node database, and developing alert action scripts.

NetCrunch comes with many predefined resources, such as precompiled MIBs, Monitoring Packs, and icons. However, this might not be enough in the specific production environment, so we let you extend these resources accordingly.

Extending

SNMP MIBs

Now you can find any MIB for your device online. You can find collections of more than 65 thousand MIB definitions.

NetCrunch has its own MIB compiler, allowing you to compile any MIB. Because some MIBs contain bugs, they may be cumbersome to compile.

If you have any problems compiling MIBs, please let us know, and we will try to compile MIBs for you.

SNMP Views

NetCrunch contains definitions for the forms and tables displayed for SNMP data from a device. There are groups of specific, detailed views for certain devices, such as printers, switches, and other devices.
Using these forms, you can change SNMP variables. You can also create custom view forms and tables using SNMP View Editor.

Custom Fields

Network nodes in NetCrunch are kept in an in-memory database and stored in XML files.
You can easily extend node data by adding additional fields. It will allow you to classify and group network data to suit your needs. The feature allows the creation of dynamic views based on these additional fields and using them to manage an alerting action as well.

Example:

Problem:

You want to notify a different group of Administrators (using groups is always more flexible than a single user), depending on the department and location where the server is located.

Solution:

Add a custom field for the department and set the location. Set up dynamic node views based on the department and location fields. In the Alert action list, you can now define different notifications for each defined view.

Calculated Counters

Sometimes the device returns parameters that need to be calculated before further processing. For instance, the data needs to be divided, or we want to have percentages instead of raw values. You can solve such a problem by adding a Calculated Counter calculated upon the given expression. See Managing Calculated Performance Counters.

Custom Monitoring

You can extend NetCrunch monitoring using external scripts or programs, or create a custom parser for data processing. The script can be run locally on the NetCrunch Server or remotely on other machines. You can also poll data via HTTP or let the parser process data from a remote location via the REST API. Read more in Sending Data to NetCrunch

Customizing

Custom Views

In NetCrunch, you can create your views of node groups that make managing alerts and reports easier. You can create your graphical views with customized icons and widgets.

There are separate tables for each node group view showing data specific to a given Monitoring Engine. You can customize each view easily.

Customizing the Administration Console Screen Layout

The Administration Console can be very flexible: it can run on multi-monitor systems, and you can create a custom multi-monitor layout.

Customizing Notification Messages

Most events include many details describing their context. You would not be able to see all of them in the text message on your smartphone or even in the email. You can create message formats suitable for notification types and specific alert types. Include the information you need. The program automatically creates HTML emails (you can also customize them) when sending an email, and it uses plain text for SMS/text messages.