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encrypting solarwinds agent communictaion

Hi Folks,

it's a long journey with SolarWInds as there are so many benefits, and with that som many configurable options :-)

So to my current problem..... I am looking at securing the agent to poller communication. The documentation seems to indicate that this is possible, but gives no indicatiion as to how this is achieved, whether it is automatic and whether there is any administrative control.

Unfortunately management have been reading t'intenet about cyber-crime and as a result, we'd like to utilise the highest level possible security and as we have our own PKI we can use our own certificates (very different from self-signed apparently). We have configured https for the browser, but now want to protect the under-the-hood communicatiions starting with agent-poller.

Any pointers to tech notes, manual page entries etc will be most welcome, as will any hard fought was stories.

Thabnks in advance folks.

Cheers

Dave#...

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rfroembgen

Hi Dave,

here are some Infos about the agents and their security. (Something, but not much)

Poll devices with SolarWinds Orion agents

How agents work - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

The agents are encrypted with 2048bit or 3072bit TLS encryption.

The communications between Orion Server and the agent are fully encrypted using 2048-bit or 3072-bit Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption, based on the agent and certificate versions. The agent protocol supports NAT traversal and passage through proxy servers that require authentication.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards

Rene

mesverrum

This article seems to have some detail on the inner workings of getting the agents to pick up a new cert, but in their case they say you delete the existing agent provisioning cert and when orion starts the services back up it will regenerate a new self-signed. Not sure if there is a way to intervene, generate an agent-provisioning cert using your own CA, and then get Orion and the agents to recognize that.

Troubleshoot Solarwinds agents and certificates in NPM 12 - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

But on the other end of this, I'm not sure I can see any reason to muck with the details of who generates the cert that the agents use. The point of ssl/tls is that it is encrypted adequately to prevent sniffing on the wire and can only be decrypted on systems that have access to that original cert. The only people who have access to that self generated cert would be admins on your servers (it is generated on the fly by your server using standard Windows operations when you install Orion, it's not like it "comes from Solarwinds corporate"), and they would have exactly that same level of access if you use a cert issued by your CA anyway.