All,
I manage an I.T. team of 3 individuals. While we are a small shop, we have a fairly large customer base and our I.T. needs reflect many of those that are in enterprise organizations. We are also new to Solarwinds. We have purchased the SAM module and are in the process of setting up our monitoring. Our main problem is, like many small shops, I don't have a dedicated AD, SQL, Exchange, etc administrator. Instead I have a few individuals with decent knowledge who wear many hats. This is one of the primary reasons we purchased this product. I'm hoping to be able to intelligently set up system monitoring so we don't have to spend so much time managing our environment. The problem is, we don't have the experience to be able to set up the monitoring that would best enable us to be able to proactively solve issues as they arrive. People will quickly point out that we should start reading/experimenting/etc. This is good advise, however, one could spend a career learing this product and it seems we should be able to get a decent baseline going in a relatively small amount of time. I'm sure this is why there are many templates preconfigured. This brings me to my question. I'm mainly concerned with AD. Do the AD templates that are provided include the baseline that all companies should be monitoring? There are a lot of counters and seeing that it equates directly to licensing, I'd like to tone it down a bit if possible. If there is a whitepaper/article that explains basic AD monitoring and principles behind it, I'd be happy to take a look. I'm simply trying to understand what basic monitoring I should be looking at to ensure I can proactively monitor my AD environment. We have two domain controllers running W2K3 AD level.
Sorry for the long post.
Thanks,
Carl
