Monitor whether DR site is up

Question

Hey guys, So I currently have one main site and a secondary DR with some essential servers used for failover. Since the site is small and not really used we did not feel it warranted the cost of a secondary poller. We have a pipe to that site so even though we monitor the status of those servers using solarwinds we don't actual know when the location looses internet. Since we have a Windows AD domain controller there setup to use google DNS I was wondering if there was a way to query that node for external entries and then if I get a timeout we would know that the site's internet is down.

Please let me know if there is an easier way to accomplish this, this was just an initial idea. Anyways, does anyone know how to accomplish the above?

m_roberts · Answer

Hi

If you have an Orion at your Primary DC and you want to identify if the Secondary DC is up or not, you need to get the results of the polling from the secondary site. Whether you are using your Orion server to perform polling across the to secondary DC or you have a probe (such as the NetPath agent) or a SAM script or several other options, you need the connection to be working to get that information into the primary Orion server.

Therefore, yes you can use NetPath and if the site goes down the NetPath entry will show as down. Alternatively you can put all of the Secondary DC devices into a Group (I always do two sub groups for a remote site; WAN and LAN devices) and if none of the objects are pollable, then the Group object will go into a Down status.

jorich · Answer

If you have NPM as well, this sounds like an excellent use for NetPath with a probe installed on one of your DR-site resident servers.