Remote poller for MSP's SMB Customers

Currently, In order to use Orion NPM/NCM in an MSP fashion with a customer's internal infrastructure. There are two options:

* Enterprise customers: Install remote poller at customer site with VPN back to NPM headend.

* SMB customers: Create VPN from from customer firewall to MSP's Orion headend and probe through VPN. (Very time consuming to setup and maintain for MSPs)

PRTG has a great feature that I believe would be beneficial for MSP's SMB clients. A small remote poller that get's installed on SMB Client site.

Idea:

Step 1: Create a small agent that gets installed on one PC at a SMB customer site that polls all local equipment (SNMP, syslog, NCM features, etc).

Step 2: Compress data and send over https/TLS to MSP's headend poller at a public address. (Not requiring SQL DB access or VPN Access from SMB customer).

Step 3: Solarwinds could charge MSP's a "per agent poller" fee that's more in line with what an SMB would be able to afford (as oppose to the expensive full blown poller that you would setup for an Enterprise customer).

Step 4: Solarwinds, MSP, and customer are happy.

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Comments

planglois

This is a must for a MSP. Paessler's PRTG in gaining a lot of market in big IT firms needing to monitor multiple smaller external sites that are not directly in their main network...

skyblademonkey

For what's an enterprise level platform, it seems solarwinds are a bit detached from the realities of some environments. Not everyone can/wants to leave all ports open across links. Firewalls, Natting.... This causes problems and lost monitoring options. Rules out monitoring of clusters as SNMP may not respond as the physical server responds not the Virtual server. As for WMI it's not useable unless you restrict down ports on the servers and this isn't really an option on a managed services environment, how may customers want to make changes to their mission critical SQL server. Solarwinds needs to have remote pollers that can handle the likes of exchange, sql or anything else that has added metrics via WMI queries. The bulk of the systems are ok with SNMP but needs option for when this doesn't provide the solution. One option for VIP monitoring over SNMP is to use a port forwarder and adjust the nodes SNMP ports in edit nodes.

http://tinyurl.com/kqqvgzn

As the node live is via ICMP to the proxy server up/down isn't possible on this but it provides something Solarwinds can't.

All that's needed now is to be able to do the same with a WMI environment. Possibly some sort of web environment that allows for an agent on the client/remote site to act as proxy.