I was going to buy Solarwinds NPM and Network Analysis but after a conversation with one of their Account Executives I'm not sure. I thought I understood the product pretty well but he's telling me it won't work in my environment. This can't be right.
It's a simple setup, The Solarwinds server would sit behind a firewall either with a public IP or a one-to-one NAT and would be accessible to the Internet. The devices I would be monitoring would connect to the server across the internet. If I'm only collecting NetFlow, Syslog, and/or SNMP Traps the device might be behind NAT. If I'm monitoring availability (ping, snmp query, something else) the device will either have a public IP or a one-to-one NAT with open tcp/udp ports as necessary. All this sounds pretty standard to me.
But the Solarwinds guy is saying that I would need to install Solarwinds at every location so it could "discover" the devices. He called it a "sonar discovery", don't you love it when Marketing names a technical process?
Is this right?
I had a short list of other questions but this would be a show stopper so I just dropped it. But I can't get over how wrong this sounds.
