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Getting the Server Admins onboard with SAM

We (network team) have been testing SAM on Exchange/Windows Servers/IIS/SQL. It is a very powerful tool. The problem we have is that the Server Admins are not too keen on Solarwinds. They still think of it as a network tool. We've done demos to them to show them the benefits but they are not budging. Anyone had this experience and overcame it?

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designerfx

You need time and willingness to be able to show them what can be done. If you're not able to sell it to them, then you need someone else on your team trying to help you with that or both. Or a different target audience, such as said team's managers. It's not going to happen overnight and there's always going to be plenty of intertia against (tool) vs (previous mature tool), regardless of if it's an improvement or not. The only other approach is find someone on said server admin team who is actually interested in the tool and show/enable them, to let them show the rest of the team what can be done.

I suggest showing them custom views, NOC views, maybe turn things on for AD monitoring or any particular high value software the admins wanted to monitor - AD and other MS specific tools are one area people tend to underestimate what Orion can do. Maybe even flip on hardware health as well as some AWS/remote monitoring via agents (such as NAT/Reverse NAT environments) . Thanks to aLTeReGo I was able to figure out SAM agent - NAT to NAT? - in order to monitor servers that our local infra was relying on but were actually virtual VM's hosted by a third party behind *their* firewall via the SAM agent - for a variety of services and information. This as well as monitoring individual azure VM's in a cloud via a single proxy. All of these provide value.

It all boils down to matching the use case of the team you're trying to show the tool to.

silverbacksays

Sounds like your server team has a bad case of 'get off my lawn, network guys!' itbrian! Traditionally, there have always been lines of delimitation between server and network teams, and anything one side tries to introduce is generally seen as a trojan horse or at worst a threat to jobs! I have seen it before in many different organisations.

IMHO what you need is to get in touch with a local SolarWInds partner, and have them come in for a day and show them the glory of SolarWinds from a completely unbiased perspective, concentrating on SAM. Suggest it to the server team managers, and have them organise and book it.

Another thing you could try is to share the SolarWInds youtube channel with them. There are a number of really good videos on SAM and it's capabilities which should start getting them interested in using the tool.

Finally, try deploying a SAM evaluation on to a throw away VM and give them admin rights to go play with it. As it's separate to "your" instance, it doesn't matter what they do, and they can play without "interference" from the network team. There's no better experience than first hand experience, and this would be the best way to do it.

Deltona

Hi there,

What product or group of products are they using now?

itbrian

Deltona They are using System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

itbrian

Thanks for the suggestions silverbacksays designerfx We actually have the ULX license for SAM and it is deployed to the DC's, Exchange and SQL environment. I gave them full admin access to it. I setup all the monitoring for them. THe only thing they need to do is use it. I will continue to push for this. Thanks for the suggestions and recommendations.

designerfx

Maybe you can basically encourage them to be engaged - via asking them questions about alerts/warnings for those particular items? Like "hey, this is going off, is this important" etc?

Appinsight for Exchange/SQL is incredibly useful and nothing in SCOM (which is really the only other tool targeted for these) is quite an exact match for what AppInsight can do for them and how simple it looks. SCOM has been updated to try to match it going forward. I've been a SCOM admin as well as a solarwinds admin.

Meanwhile, "I setup all monitoring for them" makes me wonder if you actually got their feedback in what they wanted monitored/how in the first place? Sounds like you were all "hey guys, I can do this stuff for you!" and they were basically silent. Just like silverbacksays.

Maybe adatole (poke poke) wants to give you some wisdom on this too. I'm sure most experienced admins have all been there before.

aLTeReGo

You could share the following case study with your systems folks.

http://content.solarwinds.com/creative/pdf/CaseStudies/Carilion_Case_Study_Final.pdf

itbrian

designerfx Thanks that's exactly what I am going to start doing.

adatole

I might take a different tack. Assuming you have a good relationship with the server team (meaning you guys can sit around and shoot the sh..tuff), ask them about their nagging issues. The errors or issues they just can't get a bead on; or the ones that are so persistent that it overwhelms them.

It might be something really big and complicated (post it on Thwack and we'll help you sort it out!). Or it could just be annoying - like restarting the IIS application pool.

Whatever it is, if you can show how SAM gives them a leg up it might provide the motivation to check out your SAM install a bit more closely.

orioncrack

They are 90% correct ....

tinmann0715

I am dealing with the same problem at my company. What I have done to help circumvent that is:

1. Organized my nodes by: Business Unit, geographical location, Business function, IT Tier & Support level, and Service Owner.

2. Organized the nodes into customized Dashboards based on the above categories.

3. Added Tabs to each dashboard for non-PRD and PRD assigned nodes.

4, Added an additional tab for a "Summary:" page which consisted of Top 10's for various KPI's and thresholds, and a list of "Nodes w/ Problems".

5. I then educated members of the Network team on how to quickly manipulate the Solarwinds pages to get to the useful information.

6. Every opportunity I got I pushed Solarwinds into the... "conversation." I constantly sent, and re-sent, out links to the dashboards. And I constantly mentioned the value of "...visibility into our network" that the SolarWinds dashboard, and NPM/SAM, provided.

It's been an uphill battle and it has taken a lot of training and re-training. But I am happy to say that 5 years ago when I took over monitoring there were only 2 people logging into Solarwinds everyday. Now we are upwards of 30, and it ism't just IT people anymore.