We are in the process of evaluating an implementation of "Web Help Desk" and wanted to confirm some aspects of automated reporting and ticket generation via "Solar Winds Sources". The intention is for the help desk to run internally for the purposes of tracking events and generating reports for multiple customers. I am not positioned well in terms of time and resources to fully validate the answers to my questions which is why I need some assumptions validated by experts who have already done some of these things:
If we position some ORION instances as sensors on a per-customer basis, can we add each "sensor" as a "solar winds source" within that section of "Web help desk"? I fully expect the answer to be "yes" based on what I have read
With regards to the specifics of this question, what ports are required to be opened to facilitate this communication - for example - the "sensor" is positioned in the customer's DMZ, so it can both monitor and provide alerting services for a customers devices, but also so our help desk can connect to it and retrieve the relevant data. The part of the documentation which outlines adding an orion server via the "SolarWinds Connection" dialog, does not cover this information specifically but is instead focused on how to leverage alerts for automatic generation of tickets - something we intend to do, but we want to make sure we have identified all necessary tcp/udp ports that need to be available between the sensor and WHD to facilitate this. I would prefer to not spend a day trying to sniff server activity to determine this information.
I also want to confirm that relationships can be established between multiple sources (orion servers) and would like to know if there are any glaring limitations (# of sources/devices per orion server/etc..) that are not explicitly defined in the guide. This information may be in a different section of the guide than the configuration pages I'm reading, so a referral to that information would be just as good, if not preferable to the information itself.
With regard to reporting, can orion NPM data be integrated to WHD? In the guide it outlines billing and ticketing reports, but can availability/performance data from the individual orion implementations be imported to WHD for the purposes of centralized reporting? I haven't read the whole guide, but I can't find where this possibility is covered. The "Import data" section of the guide focuses on the import of customer, asset, and location data central the operation of the help desk. I expect that much of that information can be populated when a "Solar Winds source" is completely integrated to WHD, but as I mentioned, I lack the resources to test this theory.
So the questions simplified to a list are:
1. Can WHD maintain relationships to multiple solarwinds sources?
2. As part of this relationship, does location and asset/inventory data get automatically integrated?
3. What firewall/security/port information do we need to open in order to establish full connectivity between a "solarwinds source" and WHD?
4. Can NPM data from Solarwinds sources be integrated to the reporting capabilities of WHD?
5. What are some well known limitations and/or "gotchas" of attempting to integrate WHD and multiple Solarwinds Sources?
That's all I have for now, I appreciate any input.
