Prometheus connector?

robert777

Hi All.

My organization currently runs Solarwinds ("Gen 1 Orion") version 2024.x on premises mode (no cloud).

We now have Prometheus installated as part of a recent Redhat Openshift deployment (kubernetes).

I can pull individual metrics into Solarwinds using a SW http script monitor hitting the Prometheus "Thanos" monitoring endpoint.

But... looking for a more full-featured data connector so we can pull a wider range of Prometheus metrics into Solarwinds. 

We have a full-featured connector as part of Grafana which comes with Openshift.  I believe Solarwinds has a full-featured connector that comes with the Observability suite (App-Optics) which runs in the Cloud.

Note my organization has recently switched to Hybrid Cloud Observability licensing away from the traditional licensing model.  We plan to run Solarwinds on premises for the foreseeable future.

Question: does anyone know of ANY WAY that we can use the full-featured Prometheus connector with on-premises Solarwinds?  My organization would like to use Solarwinds for data visualization as well as alerting, but it seems that using on-prem Solarwinds we can only capture Prometheus metrics one at a time using script monitors.

Thanks in advance for any input from the community.

mesverrum

So to be accurate, you arent trying to pump data from your prometheus into solarwinds, you are trying to get solarwinds to scrape a prometheus style collection of metrics?  Like you mention, it's doable via custom scripts.  There could be a world where SW eventually releases something akin to an appinsight template that reads a prom endpoint and it does the leg work to create a component for each data point, but its risky because there are some fundamental differences in how prom data works verses how SAM expects data to come in.  SAM doesn't have an equivalent to several of the data types that prom supports, so it's always going to be a bit of a "user beware" kind of scenario.

Looking at features of AppOptics is kind of irrelevant, because that software was written from the ground up with an entirely different approach so there's not really a way to "port" it to Orion.

I don't want to seem like a kill joy, but if your Openshift includes native prometheus and grafana as part of the package you will spend a LOT of effort trying to swim against the current to get that data into Orion instead of just displaying that data in Grafana.  It's actually much easier to use Grafana as an overlay for Orion than to try and make it work the other way around.


The only way I can imagine for SolarWinds to properly ingest Prometheus metrics would be a complete rewrite of the back end where they store the data to make it compliant with the protocol.  It's a big enough change that it would amount to being very close to a total rewrite of Orion itself so I'm sure you can imagine the powers that be aren't eager to jump into that.  I feel like the simple test is if Orion still doesn't have dark mode you are probably not getting the ability to ingest timeseries prometheus/otel metrics.