Scripted Node Addition

Hey everyone,

I know this topic pops up every so often, but does anyone have a good automated way of adding nodes to SolarWinds, specifically Windows devices through WMI and/or Linux based systems through SNMP. I know we would like to get it to a point where the node is automatically added through a Service Now workflow. Our linux team was even thinking about trying to get something going through Ansible to do this.

I saw a couple different posts and articles out there, but they appear to be a couple years old. I've had hit/miss experiences with doing this years ago, but the process itself seemed to be very wonky. Alot of times the node itself would get added, but then it would be missing volumes or polling was practically non-existent. Other versions I've tried, I believe tied into the Network discovery piece and that was exteremly hit/miss on if it would work exactly.

I'm also a little hesitant with trying the items out since I don't have a full lab environment. I had an issue in the past where I was doing a test call to disable a single component in the envrionment, and it ended up disabling every SAM component in the environment.

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KMSigma.SWI

First things first: you need a test/dev environment. I cannot stress this enough. After that look at the examples provided in the GitHub

PowerShell: OrionSDK/Samples/PowerShell/CRUD.AddNode.ps1 at master · solarwinds/OrionSDK · GitHub / OrionSDK/Samples/PowerShell/CRUD.AddWMINode.ps1 at master · solarwinds/OrionSDK · GitHub

Python: orionsdk-python/samples/add_node.py at master · solarwinds/orionsdk-python · GitHub

Doing the same thing with a RESTful API call is pretty much identical, except you'd send the information to the server via an HTTP Post. The SWQL Studio can help you learn what needs to be send in the body by using Edit > Copy Query As > curl.

mesverrum

You are correct, automatic addition of objects has always been and continues to be a bit wonky in Orion. With that said I know lots of people who put in the time and got it dialed in for their environments over the years, it just took some experimentation because almost nobody agrees on exactly how they want their imports to work.

Kevin is dead on about needing a test env. Those examples from the repo are workable but the problem is they rely on you already knowing ahead of time all the pollers that the node will support, and for SW to not change any of them (some recent changes broke some of my automations so I'm salty on the topic).

Going via discovery and enabling it to automatically add the nodes is definitely the more flexible solution, but then you get into longer running scripts and also needing to add some logic in at the end to validate that the thing you wanted to add actually got discovered.

This is a pretty simple example of a start for a script based discovery with auto import turned on, but the ones I actually use in production tend to be at least 4x longer than this with all kinds of additional logic and sanity checking and logging built into them.

https://github.com/Mesverrum/MyPublicWork/blob/master/DiscoveryByScript

SteveK

I've been pushing for the lab environment, but no luck as of yet. We don't have the lab licensing at the moment, and don't really have the time or man hours to consistently be spinning up and decomming a lab for the 30 day window (or whatever the trial defaults to now).

mesverrum

Hco licensing now includes lab licenses for people who have more than 500 nodes.

Otherwise I can say it's totally possible to script lab deployment if you are serious about making it happen. At my old job I could spin up our dev environment and populate it with my test batch of nodes (via a discovery very similar to what we're talking about) and apply the relevant SAM templates in about 30m. It seems overkill to some, but all those same automations become directly applicable to managing your prod system as well so the time investment pays off.

SteveK

We are still utilizing the legacy licensing model. I like alot of the HCO, but with our node count it did add a bit of cost to it.

DGNetops

You have been a life saver with those scripts of yours. Your Dependencies scripts I modified some for my environment and MAN! It is a life saver and I have it running daily at 7AM via Ansible.

Going to be reviewing your discovery script examples as well because this has been a thorn in me and my teams side for years. We can't do blanket discoveries in our environment so looking to create a scheduled discovery per site per net management subnet that then auto imports nodes. Secondarily I will then be looking to auto add to NCM with correct creds and if theres an issue with a cred to spit out which one failed.

Trying to get it all written in powershell and then using Ansible to handle the scheduling and reporting functionality.

Do you have any tips that you have found useful?

The only automation so far we have is for world map updates, dependencies and to harvest the hardware model and add to a custom property value for additional sorting capabilities in NCM Firmware view. I have a Test Environment via HCO Lab license that I am POC'ing everything in but still - sometimes my ideas are bigger than my skills at the time lol

mesverrum

When I was the in house guy for a big enterprise I worked on a model where almost anything i ever got asked to do became a script that ran in scheduled tasks. I don't like being woke up for on call issues or having a lot of tickets coming in.

For a long time Ive felt that the best thing about Orion was that if there was anything I didn't like it was almost all open enough that I could just change it. The people I've met who are most frustrated are the ones waiting for their favorite feature requests to make it in. Half the time its faster to solve with a script than to write up the FR.

rtbailey

How about adding new switches using scripting. Is there a way to select the interfaces you want up specifically? We only usually choose the Uplink ports. DO you have a script you can share that might show adding a switch via scripting?