How to design logic for service status?

egas

Hello World!

I'm hoping that I am not the first one to have this question and that somebody has figured this out.

We want to create dashboard so that we can see where the status of business services. The statuses we have in mind are Online, Degraded and Offline. The degraded status is what we are having trouble with.

Allow me to create a scenario, we have a company internal application that is hosted on a pair Windows VMs running the server software configured as primary and secondary which talks to an SQL db on another Windows VM. These are the items we are monitoring:

• Windows Server - NPM
• Windows Services - SAM
• SQL - SAM

If the NPM reports that one the Windows servers that application is running on is offline, then the status of the business service should be degraded. If the database is offline, then the business application is offline.

My question is how do we configure this logic into a something visual that be placed on a dashboard In Solarwinds?

Amy and all feedback will be appreciated.

mesverrum

The way this is done in SW is to create a nested set of Groups, and within the group you can manipulate the status between worst/mixed/best to control for things like redundancy and load balancing.  Depending on how specific your logic is these nested groups can get pretty complex, but as an example using SW HA and my SQL instance I would build out something like

Solarwinds Parent group > the status of this is what i want my business user to see as green (up) /yellow (degraded) /red (down)
- SW Web Server group (best)
  - SW Website SAM template on node 1 of my load balancer pool
  - SW Website SAM template on node 2 of my load balancer pool
  - etc etc for however many servers are in the pool
- Main App Server group (worst)
  - SW App SAM template
  - SW Main HA Node 1
  - SW Main HA Node 2
- SolarWinds Database group (worst)
  - SQL Server SAM template for SQL VIP
  - SQL Server SAM template for individual SQL instance 1
  - SQL Server SAM template for individual SQL instance 2
- SW APE's (best)
  - SW APE HA Pool 1 group (best)
    - SW APE SAM template on node 1
    - SW APE SAM template on node 2
  - SW APE HA Pool 2 group (best)
    - SW APE SAM template on node 3
    - SW APE SAM template on node 4
  - etc  etc for however many APE pools i run

You can kind of manage your own comfort level on what you roll up in terms of status, to me if either member of my main node HA pool is down I am worried because stuff gets nasty fast when the MPE is unhealthy, but if this was purely aimed at my users then I could actually choose to go with best status on that group, as long as one of them is up things will be loading.