I thought a new release is supposed to be better!!

HCL

I had a chance to spend some tine with the new Application Performance Monitor yesterday. 

• The SNMP Process Monitor, brings back the running processes (as in the windows task list)
• The WMI Process Monitor does the same thing but through WMI
• The Windows Service Monitor brings back the running services. 

The question is aren’t these all the same thing - so what’s the point if offering 3 ways to get the same data? (also whats the performance hit on the remote server, I might want to monitor 20 or 30 processes per server, which is best SNMP, WMI, Win Srrvice Mon?) 

 

 On the old system it used to show all the running processes on a remote box so I could simply select them, why was this removed, it's way more time consuming to have to remote on to each box and manually note the processes I want to monitor - also you're assuming I have remote access to some of these servers - SNMP, yes - RDP, often no. 

 

Also why remove the very useful 'Show multiple running instances' report? I searched in vain for a way to create a report to show this, thankfully the install kept the old version on the list of installed Orion Modules so we can still use it.

hesonder

I normally do not respond to people that only vent on what they do not like, overlooking the good parts. I do not work for SolarWinds and do not feel the need to defend them, but this is a new module (v1.0 says it all) for which they solicited input via one of the forums on this site that has functionality that goes beyond the Application Monitor module.  Secondly, nobody forces you to switch to AM that is still available and can operate aside APM.

Your assertion that you now have 3 ways to do the same thing is true to a certain level. But if you monitor MS Windows servers, you should be thrilled with WMI, since that will give you access to more information than SNMP ever will. (SolarWinds is saying that they are working on a Custom Poller for WMI).

Yes, it would nice that there would be an enumeration function, but there are other ways to access that information that does not involve RDP. If you have an account with local admin rights to the server you can use Computer Management to connect to that server and see the services.

You also overlook the fact that APM is ‘template-driven’, so you have to type in the service names in only once and then apply the template to as many servers as you need to. Templates also allow you to more easily see the status of the same ‘application’ across the server farm.

I cannot believe that you cannot appreciate the fact that instead of knowing that 1 of the 10 copies of svchost.exe has stopped, you know directly can see that it is the ‘DHCP Client’ (for example).

You also seem to overlook that you are now able to monitor a number of Network Services and network ports. I expect that that list of Network Services will expand based on user/customer input.

Also the User Experience Monitors is a new feature/function you appear not to appreciate. Response times of web sites is extremely valuable information that you may want to monitor (trending).

I cannot speak to the ‘missing report’, but since the data is still in the database, there should be a way to create a report for this.

It is my opinion that APM is a major improvement over AM, although not perfect, but that should not be expected from a 1.0 version released less than 1 month ago. In fact I nearly completed the phasing out of AM.