Network & security vendors · 6 min read

Monitor site-to-site VPN tunnel state, not just the endpoints

A firewall reporting healthy doesn't mean the tunnel it's terminating is up. Here's how to alert on tunnel state specifically.

What you'll need

  • A VPN-terminating firewall or router already reporting in Linivo, with vendor tunnel-status OIDs or API access available
1

Check whether your vendor exposes tunnel-level state

Most enterprise firewalls (FortiGate, Palo Alto, ASA) expose IPsec tunnel up/down status through vendor-specific MIB extensions or their API, separate from basic interface state.

2

Alert on tunnel down separately from device down

A device that's reachable but has a tunnel down is a different, often more urgent, problem than a device that's unreachable outright: traffic silently stops flowing to a specific site instead of a clear device-down alert.

3

Watch for tunnel flapping, not just downtime

A tunnel that repeatedly drops and re-establishes (often an MTU, rekey-interval, or unstable-uplink issue) can be worse for applications than one clean outage, and it's worth a distinct alert for flap count over a rolling window.