Any Network Admins that use SolarWinds as monitoring software?

[MrEgo]

I just thought I would get some opinions of what everyone thought of it.

Basically, we're looking for an up-to-date monitoring software that monitors routers, switches, access points, servers, and pretty much anything else with an IP address. CPU utilization, memory usage, bandwidth, disk throughput, low disk space, system services, etc, would also be extremely handy to monitor.

Or if anyone has any other recommendations, feel free to share them. Thanks!

 

[imagoon]

Talking about Orion? I found it pretty damn sweet if you took the time to truly set it up. Things like monitoring the Cisco devices, having it log in and check configs and save changes (or send alerts about it) while accepting netflow data was pretty cool.

Add on VMWare vSphere monitoring and basically OS agnostic monitoring was worth it. I even had it monitoring iSeries datastores.

 

[mvbighead]

We do use SolarWinds for bandwidth monitoring of our Internet and MPLS circuits. Works well for that.

As for CPU, Memory, etc., we have Cacti for getting statistics and Nagios for checking and alarming on availability.

 

[imagoon]

We do use SolarWinds for bandwidth monitoring of our Internet and MPLS circuits. Works well for that.

As for CPU, Memory, etc., we have Cacti for getting statistics and Nagios for checking and alarming on availability.

My curiosity as well as for the OP to think about. Why did you use Cacti and Nagios? We trashed both of them when we got Orion fully up.

 

[MrEgo]

We do use SolarWinds for bandwidth monitoring of our Internet and MPLS circuits. Works well for that.

As for CPU, Memory, etc., we have Cacti for getting statistics and Nagios for checking and alarming on availability.

Why are you using those other products if you already have SolarWinds?

 

[MrEgo]

Talking about Orion? I found it pretty damn sweet if you took the time to truly set it up. Things like monitoring the Cisco devices, having it log in and check configs and save changes (or send alerts about it) while accepting netflow data was pretty cool.

Add on VMWare vSphere monitoring and basically OS agnostic monitoring was worth it. I even had it monitoring iSeries datastores.

Which version are you currently running, and what were your licensing terms? (Pricing, features, and whatever else you want to include)

 

[imagoon]

I wouldn't be allowed to release the pricing however we did buy an unlimited license [we monitored thousands of devices/endpoints with it. We used Orion Network Performance Monitor, Network Configuration Manager, Netflow, and Application Performance Monitor.

I will say... if you pay "MSRP" -> "You did it wrong."

To give you an idea, we required a separate SQL server and a decently beefing "head end" to handle the load.

 

[mvbighead]

My curiosity as well as for the OP to think about. Why did you use Cacti and Nagios? We trashed both of them when we got Orion fully up.

Price mostly... both are free and do the job.

 

[jswjimmy]

I personally use Scrutinizer v9 for monitoring my network. I've tried out SolarWinds and I feel like I get more in depth reports from Scrutinizer. It is the best tool on the market for NetFlow and they also offer a free version for up to 5 NetFlow exporting devices.

http://www.plixer.com/products/netflow-sflow/scrutinizer-netflow-sflow.php?sdr=jw

 

[jlazzaro]

I personally use Scrutinizer v9 for monitoring my network. I've tried out SolarWinds and I feel like I get more in depth reports from Scrutinizer. It is the best tool on the market for NetFlow and they also offer a free version for up to 5 NetFlow exporting devices.

http://www.plixer.com/products/netflow-sflow/scrutinizer-netflow-sflow.php?sdr=jw

did they change this recently? i used the free version about a year ago and could collect from as many devices as i wanted, just the 24-hour data restriction.

 

[mvbighead]

did they change this recently? i used the free version about a year ago and could collect from as many devices as i wanted, just the 24-hour data restriction.

From their site, it suggests 5 routers and as many interfaces on those five devices as you like.

 

[bobdole369]

We ditched Solarwinds for IBM's TSRM and associated products.

 

[Brovane]

I have a SolarWinds install.

I have a Orion NPM SLX, with a additional polling engine since we have over 10k elements. We also have the Application Performance Monitoring, Netflow, IP SLA module, and the Network Configuration Manager module.

I started using Orion back in 2005.

Orion should meet all of your needs. I can use the APM module to get down to pulling disk i/o for specific volumes and alert me if specific thresolds are crossed. It isn't perfect but as a overall tool to monitor both network and servers all under one tool it works fairly good. Using custom SNMP MIB's I can get a alert when a UPS losses utility power.

 

[MrEgo]

I have a SolarWinds install.

I have a Orion NPM SLX, with a additional polling engine since we have over 10k elements. We also have the Application Performance Monitoring, Netflow, IP SLA module, and the Network Configuration Manager module.

I started using Orion back in 2005.

Orion should meet all of your needs. I can use the APM module to get down to pulling disk i/o for specific volumes and alert me if specific thresolds are crossed. It isn't perfect but as a overall tool to monitor both network and servers all under one tool it works fairly good. Using custom SNMP MIB's I can get a alert when a UPS losses utility power.

Forgive my ignorance on the subject as I'm very new in this area, but in what situations would you be interested to see disk thresholds crossed? Are you saying you want to see when the disk writes faster than the specified number you assign to the alert?

 

[imagoon]

Forgive my ignorance on the subject as I'm very new in this area, but in what situations would you be interested to see disk thresholds crossed? Are you saying you want to see when the disk writes faster than the specified number you assign to the alert?

Something like "Disk I/O @ above 90% for 10 minutes" may indicate an overloaded disk. I used to have a certain servers that had "CPU @ 100% for 10 minutes" as another example.

 

[Brovane]

Forgive my ignorance on the subject as I'm very new in this area, but in what situations would you be interested to see disk thresholds crossed? Are you saying you want to see when the disk writes faster than the specified number you assign to the alert?

Yes this can be important for a DBA to know if a disk is overloaded. The cool thing about Orion APM module is that you can build a template to gather any counter data that is in PerfMon for a windows server. You can get fairly granular about how deep you want to dive into your server performance data.

 

[qft]

LevelPlatforms has come a long way in remote/automatic remediation and template monitoring. I suggest looking at them.

 

[Piano Man]

Price mostly... both are free and do the job.

Exactly, I use both for the same reason. Can't beat free.

 

[Brovane]

Exactly, I use both for the same reason. Can't beat free.

The issue that I have found with free tools is that there is still a soft cost to be paid if the free tool is more difficult to manage than a tool that you paid for. The other issue with free tools is if you start becoming dependent on it for production. Who are you going to call if the tool goes down and you cannot figure out how to get it working again?

 

[MrEgo]

The issue that I have found with free tools is that there is still a soft cost to be paid if the free tool is more difficult to manage than a tool that you paid for. The other issue with free tools is if you start becoming dependent on it for production. Who are you going to call if the tool goes down and you cannot figure out how to get it working again?

This is my thought as well. It's great if you're familiar with it and you can save your employer the up-front costs of its counterpart, but I've seen too many free tools end up being the same deal as a free puppy.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

I use whats up gold, have been very happy with it. Made by ipswitch

 

[bobross419]

I work at a Solarwinds only managed services monitoring shop. We've been able to do quite a bit with the product as is (40-50 NPM and APM servers total... some NCM, Netflow, and others sprinkled is as required). Overall, we are pretty happy with Solarwinds... the biggest downside for us is that there is no auditing. There is a feature request in to have this added, but no news on when it will be implemented.

Realistically, you could do damn near everything server related in APM and there is a lot of data that can be gather with just the basic NPM over SNMP. Add in the ability to add custom pollers and you can collect any data that the device's MIB offers.

The software is easy enough to use that you can pull a helpdesk monkey or two to help get everything set up.

If you do go with Solarwinds, I'd highly recommend getting familiar with the Custom Properties as these will allow you to build very modular alerts that work off the custom properties that you've included. thwack.com is a great resource and will be getting a facelift in the very near future. APM is also at 5.0 which includes some new features which I'm very excited about.

Sorry to sound like a salesmen, but I'm a huge fan of Solarwinds. As with any software it does have a few drawbacks, but the only thing that we haven't been able to work around is the lack of auditing.

 

[gordita]

I'm in the same boat. We are 'all in' with respect to solarwinds.
NCM, NPM, netflow, IPAM and SAM.
one thing I've not scoped out is automated reporting.
would love to set something up where I can show/see
- monthly BW usage for our sites (about 100)
- availability and reachability reports

Tie all this together in an excel spreadsheet so I get some great trending data...

 

[BoberFett]

Bumping this thread (I hope the mods will allow me to do that) to see what current opinions are.

I'm the IT manager for a midsize healthcare company (500 network users, ~3,500 employees total, 1 datacenter, Windows shop, 12 MPLS offices, 30 VPN offices) and we need a better solution. We've cobbled together a variety of pieces of software to monitor a lot of things and that has worked for a long time. At the moment we use Paessler PRTG for SNMP monitoring, Corner Bowl for Windows event log monitoring, Northern for disk quota monitoring, a custom solution for datacenter environmental monitoring, etc. etc.

We've never had a syslog server, but lately we've discovered we need one for better monitoring of switches, routers, firewalls etc. As we started looking into syslog options, I started wondering if it isn't time to move up our monitoring game, and switch to a single solution.

I've been looking at Solarwinds for a while, it appears to do a lot of what we want, there are modules for just about everything it seems. Then there's WhatsUp, and I've been getting contacts from CA lately wanting to pitch Nimsoft to me.

Seems like this group approves of Solarwinds.

Anyone have any experience with Nimsoft as a SaaS option?

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Ive not used Nimsoft, but Ive used both solarwinds and whatsup and both are great products, I just personally think Whats up is a better value.

I am also in healthcare, and its served us well, does disk monitoring, syslog etc and has some nice reporting features especially when it comes to checking latency over time/bandwidth etc.