If you're curious as to what we're working on...

The NPM team is busy at work on a number of highly requested enhancements:

Scheduled Discovery - the ability to schedule discoveries on a recurring basis
Syslog and Traps –
- Ability to reference Trap variable binding names and value pairs as variables in alert messages (e.g. ${vbName1}, ${vbData1})
- Ability to configure Trap alerts based on pattern matching on Trap Details
- Ability to reference Orion node variables in Syslog and Trap alerts
- Respect Orion NPM unmanaged node status in Syslog and Trap alerts
- Ability to change the status of an interface in Orion NPM based on Trap message
- Add option when forwarding a Syslog message to retain the original source IP address
- Add option to consume original address when passed in a Syslog message.
- Add option when forwarding a Syslog message to retain (and spoof) the original source IP address.
Full VMWare vSphere Support - in order to add support for vSphere 4.0 from VMWare, we can no longer gather the data we need via SNMP so we are updating our integration to gather this via their API
Connect Now - the ability to drag one or more nodes on to a map and based on the last discovery topological data, automatically connect those device together on the map
Product update notification – an in product notice to alert you to new releases and service packs are available for your Orion products
Improved upgrade experience – additional effort to reduce upgrade disruptions
Official platform support for Windows 2008 R2
Network Atlas performance enhancements

In parallel, we are also working on the following:

FIPS support – ensures product operability on a Windows OS (2003 & 2008) with the FIPS Group Policy Object (GPO) enabled, which restricts which cryptographic algorithms are allowed

PLEASE NOTE: We are working on these items based on this priority order, but this is NOT a commitment that all of these enhancements will make the next release. We are working on a number of other smaller features in parallel. If you have comments or questions on any of these items (e.g. how would it work?) or would like to be included in a preview demo, please let us know!

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justty

This seems to be a popular request. Did this make it in?

bshopp

This is up on our priority list as well, but no commitments. We are considering doing this as a stand alone utility.

pmoscicki

Not sure if this is addressed in the work being done for future release but will there be a way to more seemlessly integrate syslog and/or snmp traps into NPM? For instance it would be nice to generate an NPN alert (or event) when NPM receives a specific syslog msg or specific trap. The current version of NPM doesn;t seem to integrate syslog and/or snmp within NPM to this level. I would like a snmp trap, for instance, to generate the same type of alert as wehn a managed interface goes down. Will this be possible?

chris.lapoint

Please see this thread

kupjones

Brandon, all good stuff -- we look forward to the continued improvements. The topology aware feature is very much needed!

Thanks!

Spiky

this is a must too, if this can be brought out in the next update

kupjones

Brandon, something else to consider for features:

When performing a discovery of a network we will run into network devices that are multi-homed (MH) and in cases of fairly large networks these multi-homed devices will have multiple Layer3 paths. The issue we run into is that during the discovery each IP address, although discovered, ends up being presented as a separate device. So for any one device I will end up with N instances, N being determined by the number of pingable interfaces.

Granted, I can fix this by following best practices and enabling loopback then scanning the loopback network, but this only works for multi-homed devs that provide a loopback that is -- flexible (eg., Cisco).

Ideally, I should be able to discover an MH device and during that discover and MIB-walk Orion will figure out that I have multiple IP addrs -- which would show up in the node details. Once done I could then select the ip addr that I would like monitored ( like the loopback), and perhaps even designate alternative/secondary IPs for monitoring .

jason.clark

Thank you for giving us some insight on what we can expect in the future.

What about allowing Orion NPM to differentiate between systems based on the SNMP port? I know I've seen a few posts where people are trying to monitor modules in chassis-based systems with a single management IP or (as in my case) using PAT to traverse a firewall when provisioning VPNs is not a solution. This functionality seems like it is a high priority for those users attempting to make it happen.

Also, is there a place that describes the upgrade cycles for NPM? If I have to say "the feature might be coming," we'll want to know how long it could take. For instance, if it doesn't make it in the next upgrade cycle, how long will I have to wait for the next cycle for a possible update?

Thanks for all of the information.

FormerMember

Hi there,

Would it be possible to add the ability to assign thresholds specifically to disk volumes and also to memory and CPU? This would be a big win with my company!

Thanks,

Chris.

FormerMember

Also it would be really cool if you could have the ability to project future trends. The graphs could say (and notify in an alert) that a volume will run out of space in X number of days.

FormerMember

Also smarter email routing will be good. Currently we use email rules to forward email alerts to the appropriate people based on the content of the message. I would like this to be part of the product rather than having to use email rules. Possibly having the ability to have variables in the 'To' field of the email alert would be useful.

bshopp

Thanks for the responses. I wanted to address each comment

Spiky - this is on our list of items to add to the product, but based on current priority did not make the cut for the next release

Jason - this item is on our list as well, but as indicated in the post, did not make the cut for the next release. Regarding your second question it is hard to answer that. Mainly because our priorities today can and does change over time based on feedback from ya'll in the community, internal and external factors. So what is high on my list today may move down the list based on these events. Hopefully that makes sense. The last thing I want to do is commit something until I know it is a sure thing which means we are working on it.

Chris - we do have the first item in the system for a future release. Regarding trending you can do some of that today with 9.5, if you edit a chart and set the period for sometime in the future for example, you will see a trend line out into that future time based on the historical data we have gathered. What is not there is alerting on that, which is something we have heard from other users as well. And finally regarding the email item, it is something I will log into the system, but have not heard a ton about from ya'll. So for those reading this, if this or any of these things are important to you, please chime in and tell us so we can shift priorities based on the feedback.

kupjones - are you seeing this with 9.5? I beleive in that case we'd pick one of the IP's and only use that. If this is not the case, please let us know.

kbaumann

PLEASE NOTE: We are working on these items based on this priority order, but this is NOT a commitment that all of these enhancements will make the next release. We are working on a number of other smaller features in parallel. If you have comments or questions on any of these items (e.g. how would it work?) or would like to be included in a preview demo, please let us know!

How about native support for Juniper/Netscreen devices? This is a huge issue for me and for others based on this forum post:

jason.clark

allowing these e-mail rules to be built into Orion would be great. This would be a benefit for our environment as well.

khelgoth

I'd be happy if I could filter "last 25 events" and "alerts" on the "Network Summary" homepage to show useful things that I want to know. i.e. filter out things that I don't want...to wit: I don't need to see every interface in my 2600+ node environment changing speed, going up, going down, etc. - it hides the important events in an avalanche of general info.

I've searched the forums, but there doesn't seem to be much support in NPM 9.5 to do this.

Cheers,
Kurt

KenKasmar

Chis, the way that I have worked around the issue of limited threshold controls is to add a number of custom properties that I use as 'Alert Package Designators'. These are organized in a tiered structure with system wide defauts at the bottom of the list and the most granular at the top (volume & interface specific). Then I build alert packages for the different types of alerting that I want to do and populate the appropriate custom property with the package codes (example: DISKMSSQL001 for one of my disk volume alerting packages used for MS SQL servers).

This seems to allow for a fair amount of flexibility to those managing servers while keeping things grouped up enough (and query-able) to be able to maintain things.

chuco

Can you guys please add a recurring maintenance schedule to NPM for monitoring. This will be something that all of us would like to see I am sure. We have maintenance night every Thursday and we just hate receiving 183 emails of spam because of reboots. I've asked about this many of times and I get the the typical we are working on it. We have owned Solarwinds for a while now and we haven't seen it yet as a feature in the NPM 9 versions.

extrands

How about more granularity on interfaces added during discovery, perhaps the ability to limit interfaces to only those that have a CDP neighbor? On a large network, you can end up with thousands of interfaces you don't necessarily want to monitor, and it can be a time consuming process to remove them. Adding CDP neighbor to the import settings, in in addtion to the current operationally up, operationally down and shutdown would be great.

Some logic that knows a device has been previously discovered, and asks, not assumes, whether a newly discovered operationally up interface should be added would be nice too. If you go to scheduled discovery, a great addition, we need some additional ways to filter what ends up being added.

Miron

Hi,

I would have liked to see some development into the following few items among others.

Network Atlas:

Being able to resize labels/text boxes
Position Securing of Labels/text boxes which dont move when other objects are added
Ability to insert a table
Automatic addition/population of table by possible object attibutes.
Ability to drag and drop objects into a table cell
Increased icon support
Generic objects such as racks of different sizes, equipment of different sizes for quick creation
automatic/dynamic map creation based on object properties. Ie this map has all objects which have custom property: Priority - High.
Option to automatically delete all presence of nodes on map if you delete a node rather than going through maps individually.

Some focus on Services in addition to individual nodes/applications.

The ability to create a service object
ability to assign nodes/interfaces/applications/custom to the service/s
Define attributes of the service such as sla,kpi,owner,1st line support,base service,
be able to create a resource page per Service which can serve as a service catalogue description including service dependencies(like a service catalogue entry)
ability to add service objects as dependant on other service objects
ability to alert on service object status

Web Portal

Inbuilt ability for map rotation
drag/resize/reposition resources with web portal for end users and saved per user.

User Management

Role based access
creation of groups
mapping into AD/radius/tacacs authentication
change management options
options to have approval process
logging user changes

Reporting

The option to keep past node statistics for accurate reporting.Currently If you remove a node your reporting metrics will change and no longer be accurate
Would be good to report on the trends on number of nodes/applications/interface managed so that you can show how the server performs compared to number of monitored objects
all of the other request that fellow users have had on here like addition of graphs

Health

better support for inbuilt ability to automatically recover from service failure (like the current npm process having to be manually restarted after polling engine stops polling
or better alert mechanism to inform users of server issues.

Regards

Miron

bshopp

Good list, so I am going to respond to each inline here. Please feel free to PM me offline to discuss these more in depth further.

Network Atlas:

Being able to resize labels/text boxes
So just an FYI, if you want to do multi-line you can do a shift-enter to get a new line.
Position Securing of Labels/text boxes which dont move when other objects are added
So other customers who have hit this issue have used the linked backgrounds feature and places the image in the Orion web server directory and pointed at it to get around this.
Ability to insert a table
Can you define this a little further. What are you looking to do? What type of data?
Automatic addition/population of table by possible object attibutes.
Again, please explain a little further.
Ability to drag and drop objects into a table cell
I think this will make more sense to me when I get the other data from above
Increased icon support
Fair enough, there is another thread of thwack where our UI designer is asking for feedback
Generic objects such as racks of different sizes, equipment of different sizes for quick creation
automatic/dynamic map creation based on object properties. Ie this map has all objects which have custom property: Priority - High.
Understood. Connect Now which I have outlined above is the first step, but I completely agree with you
Option to automatically delete all presence of nodes on map if you delete a node rather than going through maps individually.
Understand the use case

Some focus on Services in addition to individual nodes/applications.

The ability to create a service object
ability to assign nodes/interfaces/applications/custom to the service/s
Define attributes of the service such as sla,kpi,owner,1st line support,base service,
be able to create a resource page per Service which can serve as a service catalogue description including service dependencies(like a service catalogue entry)
ability to add service objects as dependant on other service objects
ability to alert on service object status
So here you require the ability to group together one or more services or apps together into a Service for example. So Service A contains app A, app B, service C, nodes A,B,C

Web Portal

Inbuilt ability for map rotation
What are you using today? Alot of users use the Firefox plugin, does this not work?
drag/resize/reposition resources with web portal for end users and saved per user.

User Management

Role based access
creation of groups
mapping into AD/radius/tacacs authentication
change management options
What type of change management options?
options to have approval process
What types of actions do you want approval around?
logging user changes
We have this logged as audit trail

Reporting

The option to keep past node statistics for accurate reporting.Currently If you remove a node your reporting metrics will change and no longer be accurate
Would be good to report on the trends on number of nodes/applications/interface managed so that you can show how the server performs compared to number of monitored objects
all of the other request that fellow users have had on here like addition of graphs

Health

better support for inbuilt ability to automatically recover from service failure (like the current npm process having to be manually restarted after polling engine stops polling
or better alert mechanism to inform users of server issues.
Fair enough

oreo.speedwagon

If you're looking for suggestions, how about this:

Why not have predefined "Pollers" for platforms, such as Cisco, VMware, etc... Much akin to Microsoft Operations Manager's "Management Packs"? I like the quick turn up of an NPM install, but I wish there were more data available in a quick and easy fashion. It seems that just a bit more info that could be available, like CDP neighbors, etc. would be a quick win and great value proposition to your product.

extrands

Nothing but net!!! Great idea.

Miron

Hi,

I will expand and add further detail to the items listed and commented on:

Network Atlas:

Being able to resize labels/text boxes
At the moment there is not much different between a text box and label. You used to be to drag the handles of the label to create a label of the desired size regardless of quanity of text. So if you want to have a series of labels back to back to each other and want them to share size characteristics you are no longer able to.
Position Securing of Labels/text boxes which dont move when other objects are added
So other customers who have hit this issue have used the linked backgrounds feature and places the image in the Orion web server directory and pointed at it to get around this. Not sure you should require a work around, also if you decide to change a background depending on the objects in the map you have to reposition them as they move around instead of staying put
Ability to insert a table
Can you define this a little further. What are you looking to do? What type of data? Well imagine you want to create a table which lists all the urls that you monitor in the 1st column and the status in the second. Now to do this currently you would have to drag the application monitor onto the map for each url checked, assign a graphic and possible alter the label. You would then have to create a table in whatever program you choose (for instance powerpoint) then save this as an image and import it as a background into network atlas. At this point you would have to put all the URL Application monitors into the right hand column and adjust the size to fit the background , and position all the labels in column 1. Now this might work and look okay in network atlas but when you display it through the web portal you can get inconsistences in the rendering of the table and what looks like crisp edges in network atlas dont quite look right for user. You would also have the list at the bottom. 1) Instead imagine if you had the ability to create a table or draw a table. You could right click column one and say that its properties is label, right click the second column and select its properties as status. Then you drag an object into the row and the label in column 1 is filled in automaticaly and column 2 becomes a square with the status colour of the object. 2) Same as number 1 however instead of dragging the objects and adding more rows if you need to you are able to add rules to the table. So you are able to say that column 1 will contain lables of all nodes with specific criteria - basic filter (so any application that has url monitor). Then if you create or remove url application monitors they automatically get added/removed from the table and the table resizes acccordingly 3) Now if this was possible great but lets make it cooler. Lets say we want to add columns for SLA and availabality. So the SLA column takes its content from a custom propert like 95%, in the available column you are able to show the current/weekly availablity. To make it tricker is could also change colour to indicate if it is below the SLA based on alert thresholds for a device or group of devices.
Automatic addition/population of table by possible object attibutes.
Again, please explain a little further. See Above
Ability to drag and drop objects into a table cell
I think this will make more sense to me when I get the other data from above . See Above
Increased icon support
Fair enough, there is another thread of thwack where our UI designer is asking for feedback
Generic objects such as racks of different sizes, equipment of different sizes for quick creation. To expand on this a snap in feature would be good. So you drag a 1U server into U42 and it snaps in.
automatic/dynamic map creation based on object properties. Ie this map has all objects which have custom property: Priority - High.
Understood. Connect Now which I have outlined above is the first step, but I completely agree with you
Option to automatically delete all presence of nodes on map if you delete a node rather than going through maps individually.
Understand the use case
NEW: ability create shapes and objects with network atlas, lets say i want to draw a circle or create a box to go around some nodes, these shapes can have the possiblity of having nodes assigned to them like normal objects.

Some focus on Services in addition to individual nodes/applications.

The ability to create a service object
ability to assign nodes/interfaces/applications/custom to the service/s
Define attributes of the service such as sla,kpi,owner,1st line support,base service,
be able to create a resource page per Service which can serve as a service catalogue description including service dependencies(like a service catalogue entry)
ability to add service objects as dependant on other service objects
ability to alert on service object status
So here you require the ability to group together one or more services or apps together into a Service for example. So Service A contains app A, app B, service C, nodes A,B,C - Correct Lets take for example one of my wireless services. Wireless SSID X - It uses Thin wireless devices, WLC, radius server, active directory and a ASA. Now if one of the access points goes down its not to much of a big deal, but if the radius server or asa is unavailable the service can no longer work.

Web Portal

Inbuilt ability for map rotation
What are you using today? Alot of users use the Firefox plugin, does this not work? The firefox plugin works fine, however users have the option to use browsers of their choice, so if we want them to have rotating summary screens it would be good if it was browser independent
drag/resize/reposition resources with web portal for end users and saved per user. Kind of like he google portal where the user can reposition resources, image also if you wanted to just detach a resource to view in its own window.

Maintenance Windows (Newly Added)

I see this has been talked about already but again lets take it a step further, lets say you have a particular time of the year when a certain app is critical, so lets say for the month of july every year we want to increase the polling times on this from once in 5 min to one in 2 min, and increase its custom attribute Priority to High. We want the Priority to High because we have a general alert that will send out text messages only for applications/nodes with a high priority.(examples of applications that are time dependent payroll systems are mostly important the week before payday, other times of the month if they go down it is not worth someone getting out of bed for.
How would this look, well lets imagine a microsoft calendar type scheduling assistant /rules wizard. We select the period or recurrence, we create a new rule for this within this rule we define a filter/s to address the target objects, we define a set of actions that can change the contents of a custom property or tag, we can define polling time, we can define managed status. We may need multiple rules if we have overlapping change events. So one central place to do of it rather than having to do it by object individually. It would also give you one place to view all the changes away from the norm in one place. Obviously the changes defined would be reversed one that occurence was over.

User Management

Role based access
creation of groups
mapping into AD/radius/tacacs authentication
change management options
What type of change management options? Lets say someone is going to edit something on a node. Administrator requires that an audit trail (not sure this is what you mean below)of changes to devices also needs to be maintained. So that if you look at change history for device you can see that its name was changed, had an interface unmanaged, and snmp changed. When someone does the change either they are automatically assigned a job number for the change which can be tied back to formal change management process or they can input the corporate change id number.
options to have approval process
What types of actions do you want approval around? If a user is going to change a node of a certain priority they do they change but it doesnt take effect until someone with approval access to that level authorise the change, this would extend to network atlas where you have edit permissions much like windows shares.
logging user changes
We have this logged as audit trail

Reporting

The option to keep past node statistics for accurate reporting.Currently If you remove a node your reporting metrics will change and no longer be accurate
Would be good to report on the trends on number of nodes/applications/interface managed so that you can show how the server performs compared to number of monitored objects
all of the other request that fellow users have had on here like addition of graphs

Health

better support for inbuilt ability to automatically recover from service failure (like the current npm process having to be manually restarted after polling engine stops polling
or better alert mechanism to inform users of server issues.
Fair enough

whitejcdc

Couple of small things I would like to see done...

1) In the Admin section of the website, I continually have to go back in to adjust the Limitation for a acct. Like say for a network eng acct, they need all Ciscos, but everytime we add a new device type the limitation has to be changed. Would it be possible for keyword matching on type like "Cisco" or something like that?

2) For unmanaged time set on nodes, it would be nice to see exactly the time frame its been set for on the node details page somewhere.

sraiwt

One other suggestion that is becoming a serious problem in my environment is the ability to monitor multiple contexts, and multiple devices via the same IP.

jason.clark

This is something that we've been hit extremely hard by, and I can't stress enough how important this is. Unfortunately, no one has committed to this feature. Orion still remains a great product nonetheless, but this, for my company, is one of the top most desired fixes/features.

FormerMember

Dont hold your breath waiting for logical names on DHCP nodes

jason.clark

I don't know if this has been mentioned, but we would like to have more information in the graphs. Some of the items we have troubles with for graphs that provide a point of view over a longer time period are:

It's hard to identify the specific day or time of day that an event in the graph occured.
Information such as the Maximum, Minimum, and average values are not included in the graphs, specifically the APM Statistic graphs.
Sometimes the text on the graph overlaps, which ends up looking messy.
The 95th percentile lines for interfaces (one for transmit and the other for recieved bandwidth usage) are styled exactly the same. This means that interfaces with similar transmit and receive values have 95th percentile lines that cannot be visually related to one piece of data over the other.
While not nearly as significant as the points above, it would be great to have a mouseover option on the graph, as is done in other systems such as ESX. When you mouse over a line, it shows you the specific data for that point in the graph including the time and the value.

I know some of the information, such as min. vs. max values can be retreived by choosing "raw data" or through the use of other web parts, but it would be best to have that information on the graph, where it remains relevant to our users.

Congo

I really like all of jason's points, especially the last one.

smartd

I absolutely agree. It appears that NCM has this functionality? We only need one node and a way to see all the IP addresses bound to it in details.

smartd

I'd like to have the option of a logarithmic scale, especially for availability so small % changes are evident (3 nines to 4 nines)

-=Dan=-

scottshipley

I was thinking today it would be nice to have the way to search by Cisco interface descriptions. It would make it easier to find things for those who do not necessarily know which device a given "service" is located.

GaryP

Hi all, I just posted a rather complex question regarding alerting based on Trap Detail over here: Hopefully the functionality to search Trap Detail will make it into 10.0

I'd also really like to see the ability to create and assign custom scales to graphs, this is really high on my list of priorities as I monitor a lot of none-network devices with UnDPs (such as UPSs, PDUs, APTs, NetBotz, etc.).

Big thumbs up if we get scheduled discoveries, too.

gbrance

So what are you guys doing for SQL Cluster support? We continually are having issues during failover with Orion stops writing to the database and then it doesn't start writing again after the failover is complete. Wind up rebooting both poller engines and then it will start writing again. Maybe build some logic into Orion where it will try to write again every 15mins instead of giving up after 5min and then never trying again.

smartd

While i understand that Cisco has a large market share, Juniper has made significant inroads to enterprise networks. With OEM agreements with Dell and IBM, you can predict this increasing. While we have almost 1000 cisco routers, we chose to bypass Cisco Nexus and rebuild our data centers with Juniper gear. I'd like to see a little more focus on Juniper equipment compatibility.

-=Dan=-

kupjones

I hope that decision works out - sadly, I'm not sure Juniper gets it. I just got through reading an interview (www.networkworld.com/.../020810-juniper-stratus.html on the two Juniper visionaries and frankly their explanation of what they believe drives a datacenter is odd and the timeframe for new Stratus product is really odd -- especially given that they just got through bashing Cisco for the "gradual" release of Nexus.

Ultimately, customers drive the direction of any product and SW is no exception. Witness this thread!

smartd

Cisco's decision to push FCOE so hard with us and goal to crush Brocade, the fact that Nexus was not developed under the Cisco wing so little non-Nexus integration to the rest of the Cisco products, and their decision shoot at blade center manufacturers and systems support folk with their new blade server and virtual switch (NX-1000) components that poise Systems against Networking groups drove us away.

Stratus is the goal of clustering all datacenter core switches into a single virtual cluster with ultra highspeed cluster cabling between EX8200 cores. Sound more interesting than running a "Virtual System" partitioned linux OS based Nexus switch.

-=Dan=-

jason.clark

I know it has been mentioned in the past, but we'd like to graph the polling completion percentage. Seeing other details on the Orion web page regarding the polling engine would be an added bonus. We've made some recent changes to our system that I'm hoping will help us maintain a stable completion rate above 90%. We're relying on some quick glances and performance metrics from the database server to suggest the results. Graphing this would help us know for sure.

FormerMember

I am sure it has been said before.. but ill mention it again.. being able to graph multiple sources on a single graph is important. Has there been any discussion on this? Im thankful that solarwinds allows me access to the raw data so that i can generate these graphs with ms sql but frankly the less i need to work with a dba the happier i am.

simple case in point... lets say your monitoring 3 or more seperate internet connections with both npm and apm to validate resource performance. Each gateway has 6 http 6 https 3 dns prime 3 dns secondary monitored.. Individual graphs are difficult to use in determining if a performance variation is do to bandwidth constriction on the pipe or on the internet. It is necessary to view each target group on one graph that illustrates general target latency and application latency together.

On a separate note. I might suggest (though i doubt it will ever be considered) a mechanism for managing routing on NPM. In order to do the tricky monitoring im doing it unfortunately requires a whole lot of dancing with routes on the local server in order to send the right traffic out the right interface.

How is everyone loving 9.5.1

bshopp

Looking for a few more beta testers for the next version of Orion. Specifically those who would be interested in helping us test and validate our "Connect Now" or automated topology functionality. You must be an active customer under maintanance and have the time this week and next to help out. Also you need to have a box or VM other than your production box to install on.

Send me a PM via thwack if you are interested.

unicorn

Hi Bshopp thank you for your information. This is a quite nice posting about what you are doing recently. From this post people is informed about your activity. So from my point of view this is an useful post. That is it. Thank you.

smartd

I'd like to beta test, but mainly for the advanced Trap and Syslog alerting capability. Not sure what the Connect Now is. I'd also like the switch mapper capability.

-=Dan=-

NasaGeek

Solarwinds still can't monitor Cisco SPAN ports. It would be nice to be able to force NPM to record these port's statistics.

ecklerwr1

Quick Q&A clarification on enhancements:

Syslog and Traps –

Ability to change the status of an interface in Orion NPM based on Trap message

Does this mean changing the status of interface to down (red) when a trap down message is received (before polling figures it out) or is it the ability to do something like... if I received a trap from firewall on for example a DOS attack on a network segment... then have the ability to change an interface into Admin Down status for example to do something like automate the cuting off of the DOS attack at the source?

Connect Now - the ability to drag one or more nodes on to a map and based on the last discovery topological data, automatically connect those device together on the map

Does this mean network atlas could automatically create a line between nodes because it knows the interfaces are connected for example on a WAN circuit between two nodes? And if this is this case would the status of the line then be dependent on the interfaces between nodes for status without you having to drag the interfaces into the line properties window? Maybe I'm missunderstanding what this enhancement is???

I don't mean to press I just don't quite understand the description on these two... I'm sure a lot of work has gone into trying to get the Vsphere 4 support working... I hope VMWARE documented their new API well :}

bshopp

#1 - mean changing the status of interface to down (red) when a trap down message is received (before polling figures it out)

#2 - This is the ability to drag one or more nodes onto a map and we automatically connect them based on discovery data. And yes to your second part on status

Feel free to PM me via thwack and we can do a GoTo

FormerMember

What about being able to create a list of "interesting" interfaces based on device type and automatically add only those interfaces for monitoring? Also, what about being able to periodically re-evaluate this list and add any new interfaces that match the "interested" list?

FormerMember

Will complex scenarios be supported or is this a one for one relationship between a single syslog message received and an identified interface? ie. syslog message containing X from devices A & B and syslog message containing Y on device C received within a specified time frame will result in a positive trigger on specified interface for a defined period of time..

Is this limited to effecting the status of interfaces? What about nodes or APM components?

FormerMember

Any plans to support more than one item on a graph?

BakerD

Sorry if this has been mentioned already as I just skimmed the thread.

Anyway to add the option to email a page as a pdf. Say you drill down to a certain point, or get a graph all setup the way you want, then be able to save that view as a pdf and/or email it to someone.

I have Acrobat installed and I can print my browser page to a pdf file, but it looks like crap. I have to blow it up to 125% to make anything out and then pictures/text etc are still blurry.

Thanks

IFB_Network_Ops

This is critical to us as well. We monitor a number of customer networks where we have very limited access to their resources i.e. a single IP address with PAT used to map each of the monitored devices SNMP ports.

A bump in priority of this feature would be greatly appreciated!

jason.clark

Reiterating the point made above, the ability to have multiple nodes utilize the same IP (PAT) is far and above our most desired addition to Orion.

Meganet

Do you know if this will be in the next release? This is a must have for me requested awhile ago and many others have this issue as well.

mhh351

Yes, please include me in the preview demo.

chris.lapoint

Do you know if this will be in the next release? This is a must have for me requested awhile ago and many others have this issue as well.

Does this Orion Product Blog post help you out at all?

Meganet

No unfortunately it doesn't. I think I would really need the feature added even though I wish there was an easier way.

terrys1026

I consider consolidation of multiply-discovered addresses into the core set of devices to be a key feature. It depends on how the product is originally built -- does it monitor IP addresses or does it monitor devices? I think most network people monitor devices. It makes using NPM a pain because I have to manually track the devices that it manages.

FormerMember

Here is a quick suggestion. It would be nice if the down node web component had the same tree functionality as the node tree web object.

ecklerwr1

I think I see what you mean... maybe add one called Down Nodes - Tree

tonyreel

Node down tree is a great idea.

tdanner

How about just using the regular Node Tree resource with a filter? Just click the Edit button in the upper right of the Node Tree and put "Status=1" (for down nodes) or "Status<>0" (for all nodes that aren't up) in the "Filter Nodes (SQL)" box.

FormerMember

Your right.. You can.. But it is not the best solution.

But giving the user the added functionality should they desire it makes more sense.

ecklerwr1

Didn't think of this at first... overlooked the filter resource being usable in the node tree.

brian3

Brandon,

Cisco WCS just upgraded to 6.0.181.0 and appears to be getting more data from the controllers (version 6.0.196.0). Is there anything coming out soon that might enhance the v10 Wireless side of things?

bshopp

So what new data would be interesting to you?

brian3

1. Cisco WCS forwards on "rouge AP" information to Solarwinds. Cisco claims to have worked out a distinction between a "friendly" rouge AP and a potentially "malicious" rouge AP. REFERENCE: http://cisco.biz/en/US/docs/wireless/wcs/release/notes/WCS_RN6_0_181.pdf

2. Orion Reports from WCS: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/wireless/wcs/6.0/configuration/guide/6_0reps.html

3. Heat maps? Is Solarwinds looking at doing anything similar with Network Atlas and AP info?

4. Client Management, the new version of WCS has a number of new columns for each associated client and graphed data: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/wireless/wcs/6.0/configuration/guide/6_0clientmgmt.html The Orion Client Summary View does not include all the fields

FormerMember

Historical Information would be nice..

etera

Hello,

I don't know if this is the good post for that but I would have suggestion about enhancements. It is about reports. The content is OK, but I think presentation should be improved. Actually we just can get a spreadsheet with a lot of numbers. It would be nice to be able to produce automatically graph with these datas, or to put some colors in the table in order to make it easier to read (for example, at least one line (or column) in white, the next in grey, the next in white and so on) in order to make it more readable... I think there is a work to do to make reports more usable, because reports can be very usefull, report writer is a very good idea, but the output, the reports are not "ergonomic" enough to be really usable.

Thanks,

Nicolas

etera

Other suggestions, about the node details...

At the beginning I was surprise to see that I have CPU and memory gauges only for Cisco equipments and not for other equipments (BATM, Redback, OneAccess, Ruby, TPLink...). I have found how to create it for each equipment vendor with universal poller (great tool). So now, I have the info for all the equipments, but the issue is now in the top ten. The top ten include only Cisco equipments and we have to create a different top ten for each kind of equipments. This means 6 Top ten for CPU, 6 Top ten for memory etc... Like this, Top ten is no more really interesting. It would be really interesting to be able to create a top ten (or modify an existing) with datas taken from multiple pollers. I think this development is necessary to make NPM multi-vendor capable.

Thank you,

Nicolas