How to monitor Solarwinds?

Question

Hello thwackers,

I was wondering what others are using to keep an eye on their Solarwinds server.

Scenario:

Suppose our main site is wiped off the planet. No exchange to send emails and no Solarwinds to trigger the alerts.

Goal: 
We have a "warm-site" located in another state that is ready to roll in the event  of a Worst case scenario at our HQ, what II need is a FREE solution to alert via SMS to our Admins.

My goal is to be informed when my environment is unreachable.

What I do not want:

A Cloud based solution

A Commercial (licensed) product

My initial thought was to create a physical SMTP linux box and create a script to connect to my HQ. If the connection fails, send an email to my phones SMS address.

So what are you using to monitor your monitor?

bobmarley · Answer

We have done it a number if ways.

1. Have a second smaller implementation of Solarwinds that is monitoring the main one from a second data center. It also has all of our very important nodes in it as ICMP only so it is doing a subset of monitoring. This server is mainly there to be used during upgrades, disaster recovery tests, or an actual disaster. This can also be used as your 'lab' system for testing new upgrades prior to going into production.

2. We use some of our other monitoring tools such as Microsoft SCOM to monitor the services on Orion.

3. In the past we brought up a small Whats Up Gold server and pinged only the routers on the network. This gave a quick view of the network fairly inexpensively.

conguir · Answer

Hi

any please keep in mind Alert Central. It will not monitor by itself any server or application, but you can centralise alerts from different sources, including Orion, Nagios, ....

Raul Gonzalez

Prosperon - UK SolarWinds Partners

Installation | Consultancy | Training | Licenses

rschroeder · Answer

If your main site is wiped out, you won't need to worry about waiting for a monitor to send you an SMS.  Your boss will be in touch, as will your Help Desk, and all the Technical Support staff in your organization, not to mention all the complaints that will come from your customers.

If you want something for free, your functionality and reliability will be extremely limited.

You could use a free-ware version of something like Nagios to simply poll from the warm site to critical primary systems, but it will still need an alerting avenue in which to send you an SMS message.

The free solution may end up being a source of false positives, particularly if the warm site has no resilience or redundancy for connections to the primary site, or if it relies on the primary site's Internet connectivity for getting SMS messages out.