Community
- Command Central
- MVP Program
- Monthly Mission
- Blogs
- Groups
- Events
- Media Vault
Products
- Observability
- Network Management
- Application Management
- IT Security
- IT Service Management
- System Management
- Database Management
Content Exchange
- SolarWinds Platform
- Server & Application Monitor
- Database Performance Analyzer
- Server Configuration Monitor
- Network Performance Monitor
- Network Configuration Manager
- SQL Sentry
- Web Help Desk
Free Tools & Trials
Store

How many Solarwinds Admins/Engineers would it take...

Hello everyone,

I have a question for you all and I know the answer/answers will more than likely be subjective and that's fine. I'm just curious what some of your own Solarwinds deployment experiences were like.

Quick backstory:

The company that I work for purchased SAM and Patch Manager last year and we have been up and running with it for nearly 4 months now. They gave me the fine job of being the sole Solarwinds Admin, which means I am responsible for every aspect of the Solarwinds deployment, configuration, and maintenance (VMs, SQL DB, Alerts, Custom Application Monitors, etc. etc.)

I would say that we are a small to midsized environment – I just pulled the current Platform/License Details from our setup (see below). Keep in mind that I only have about half of our environment currently being monitored by Solarwinds so these numbers will definitely increase over the couple few months.

In your own environments, how long did it take you in you to completely stand up Solarwinds –

1. Hours spent per week?

2. How many months to complete?

3. Did you have a team or did you stand it up solo?

4. What product(s) did you configure? (SAM, NPM, LEM, DPA, etc.)

In your opinions, what would you asses the workload would be for a sole admin standing up SW in an environment of our size?

Just something I’ve been curious about. I’ve spoken with other colleagues that have deployed and worked with SW in the past and they all have looked at me like I’m insane when I tell them that I am doing this by myself. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Looking forward to hearing your stories!

Network Elements

TOTAL COUNT	1066
NODES	147
INTERFACES	108
VOLUMES	811

Orion

Module Name	Orion Platform
Version	2017.3.2
Service Pack	2
Nodes currently monitored	147
Total nodes in license	2500
Volumes currently monitored	811
Total volumes in license	2500

SAM

Product Name	Server & Application Monitor
Version	6.5.0
Service Pack	None
License	Production
Allowed Number of Component Monitors	2500
Total Number of Component Monitors	547
Licensed Component Monitors	547

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

All comments

jdumke

Good News/Bad News

We have had SAM/NPM for many years at our organization. We've had one person who was primarily responsible at its inception and he was soley focused on NPM, and I've been the primary on it for the last few years with my focus being SAM.

How long does it take to stand up and start using the basics, a week or two(?). How long does it take to figure out that there is more to SAM/NPM that I will ever fully be able to utilize (2 months). Like most SW Admins I wear a lot of hats, and Orion is just one small part of my job (I get less than 2-3 hours in an average week to improve/fix), yet we monitor almost our entire infrastructure from it, and now have a NOC in its infant stages that looks at it for many hours each day.

I love this product, I think it's insanely powerful, but every time I attend a webinar about it or read some of the posts, i realize there are more features and ins/out that I don't utilize than the ones I do utilize.

mesverrum

When I was given the reigns of my first Solarwinds deployment I was also told to get our documentation under control for an environment with about 300 servers and a network of 1000 switches (although most of those switches we only needed to ping for up/down thankfully)

I worked on it intermittently learning as I went and maybe putting in an hour or two each day on either documentation or Solarwinds tasks for about a year before I felt like things were where I wanted them to be, but the bulk of the alerts and nodes were set up within a couple weeks. The part that took me so long was just digging up info on all the servers and switches we had floating around and then using custom properties to tag all that info into Solarwinds. Ended up building a lot of topology maps and diagrams as well in Atlas.

jdwinns

Awesome, thank you for sharing! I'm glad to see it's been working great and you guys are still happy with it after so many years.