Can we expect to see Kiwi Syslog features intagrated into the Solarwinds Syslog?
Over time, that is definitely the plan. To help us prioritize our efforts, it would be helpful to know which Kiwi Syslog features you'd really like to see in Orion and vice-versa.
Integrate as much as you want but please, don't mess with the standalone product, but a bit more script sample would help and a script exchange area also.
Thanks for the feedback. We'll definitely look at posting additional script samples. If you have any that you're able to share, please do ;-)
We integrated Orion with Kiwi Syslog years ago.
We configured Kiwi to write to a MYSQL DB on the Kiwi server.We then created custom queries in Orion to retrieve and display the data from the MySQL DB simialr to the Orion Syslog display.
This allows us to remove the additional load created by Syslogging to the Orion DB and improve both Syslog and Orion performance by usng a dedicated Syslog server. We use Kiwi rules for alerting.
Both the orion integrated and standalone syslog servers both server a purpose. We like to centrally aggregate the logs and then forward key events (both syslog and snmp) to the admin and support staff who also have kiwi loaded. They can then uses the cool features of kiwi to run scripts, forward to other staff members when they are out of the office, create personal alerts or alarms. The highlighting and custom icons only enhance their use of the product. The use of custom displays allows one to separate their traffic (server, router, workstation, firewall, printers, etc) on a single server. Although, I can see the advanced filtering, RegEx searches, and such incorporated in Solarwinds, I hope they dodn't forget the little guy/staff. Although it is nice to a central place to look and configure, we need to ensure that staff can make simple changes without affecting others. We know how enterprises are concerned about change management. The autoarchiving and file hashing allows one to archive the logs daily and ensure that they are not tampered with. Kiwi just has a lot of options like filtering on time of day, queue length too low or too high that it is a great product for syslog and snmp data. Together with Solarwinds, a great networking monitoring tool, we can expect to monitor, react, and be proactive for a great price and simple interface. I believe that the Solarwinds family brings reading/audio for particular events to the table as well. This is useful when receiving alerts wto behere one needs to be notified as soon as an event (for example, a stuck mail queue or flapping port) occurs without mailing everyoneone, especially if mail is down. In closing, I hope that Solarwinds will incorporate the cool features of kiwi and continue to support the standalone version.
I am quite disappointed to see Solarwinds acquire Kiwi.
Kiwi has been a strong consistent product developed by a company with a very narrow focus. Now it is one of a conglomerate of products managed. And when belts tighten and Orion/Solarwinds needs to focus resources, Kiwi, will not be a top priority. It would be if it was still owned by it's own company. Just a basic of business. Big corporations that absorb many products tend to be become mediocre at everything they do and become know for be big but not great at anything. (Microsoft, AT&T, IBM, Symantec)
The industry is filled with the fading memories of products that used to be standouts, but became muddled or discontinued because their new owners had too many other more important children.
We're still awaiting NPM fixes for the fact that CAT OS port names are a complete mystery to Solarwinds and have been for years. Here is something basic that Solarwinds has failed to respond to for years in a primary product. We NEED to know the description of the port. Thwack users has volunteered scripts so we can populate the names on CAT OS boxes, but Solarwinds wipes them out (i believ with every Discovery cycle). Maybe this is fixed in 9.1 SP3. It wasn't in 7 or 8. Maybe the graphing problem is fixed. Our graphs stop rendering every week and the workaround (re-running the web service config or rebooting) got old a long time ago. ( I came back to the forum to see if any of these have been addressed since our last upgrade to 8.5.1SP3)
I imagine there will be little development on the Kiwi Standalone products. There are needed features that would be very valueable to the customer who own full copies of Kiwi Syslogd. Such as...
Features that are triggered by the size of a log file. (email alerts) Some messages happen in small amounts normally, but when they show up in volume they require attention. Having an alert that can handle emailing when a size threshold is crossed, but not continually spamming us would be of great value. I've used Sitescope to monitor the file sizes from a separate server.
Archiving based upon age of file or space consumed by a directory (for archiving or deletion).
Multithreading-since single-cpu ultimately limits how many messages can be processed. We have reached the limit repeatedly and may have to graduate to another product because we cannot process enough messages with Kiwi. Our limit in the past was around 36megabytes per minute and was constrained by 100% CPU.
Those have been the big three for the last four years here.
I appreciate your comments and I'm not surprised you have these fears since that's how the big boys you mentioned handle most acquisitions. Rest assured, we're not them. In fact, our mission in life and the reason we've been so successful is because of our community-driven and "scrappy" approach to delivering simple, easy to use network management software (much like the Kiwis ;-). We acquired the Kiwi products because we strongly believed in both the products and the vibrant community that supports them.
So that said, there will absolutely be enhancements to the Kiwi product line and I hope that you'll help us out by participating in the upcoming prototype reviews, betas, etc. over the next quarter.
I'll let our Orion NPM product manager comment on your CatOS comments, but it is probably worthwhile to setup an Orion NPM evaluation of 9.1 on a non-production box and see if your issues have been addressed. It's certainly hard to keep up with upgrades, but it's worth noting that 8.5.1 was released in June of last year. We've had 2 significant upgrades since then with 9.0 and 9.1.
With respect to the needed Kiwi Syslog features you describe, again, I would suggest downloading the latest version of Kiwi Syslog Server. As noted in my response to your post (), we've had log file retention and scheduled archiving since 8.3.0. Latest version is 8.3.48.
I hear you on multi-threading and this is on our roadmap. As you can imagine, those kinds of fundamental architecture changes take time, but we're working diligently to make progress with each version to further enhance our performance.
Please keep the feedback coming! Being community-driven is core of who we are at SW, so we'd really appreciate you helping us continue to improve the Kiwi products that you already love ;-)
Cheers,
