A licensing Question - Server Monitoring Basics NMP or SAM?

Question

Hi All,

I'm new to Solarwinds on the Server side, and I am now starting my adventure into SAM!

But in the past i have used NPM and when this is pointed at a windows server i can get basic monitoring of that server ie CPU, RAM, HDD etc etc etc from Memory this was from WMI, but I seem to recall this also worked with the agent.

I don't seem to get this basic info from the SAM package when pointed at the server, but SAM seems to be a lot more detailed in the info it can pull out.

So, is there a way of getting the SAM module to get things like monitor my hard drive size and give me alert when its 75% full as example, or is this something inside the NPM module?

And if it is the NPM module does anyone know how this is licensed? I have a pretty large estate and have a large SAM license, on the other hand, the network team have a fairly small estate and a small NPM License, so I wont be popular if I pinch there licenses!!!

Any help and suggestions taken!

Thanks again all!

Pete

vinay.by · Answer

Hi psfletcher​,

From the problem statement that you have posted -> Baseline is go with SAM if its a system/server infra, yes it provides base monitoring (Server availability, CPU, Memory, Disk) + application monitoring(probably it has 49 component monitors which includes several app monitors) through SAM

nks7892 · Answer

Hi There,

You can monitor Disk Size and Space left in them using NPM. And licensing is based on number of Elements.

Elements can be - Node itself (as 1 element), CPU and Memory another element of that node, Interfaces, volume disk.

So for example - if you are monitoring one node with CPU and memory and 5 disk volumes nd 5 interfaces then the license required will be as below -

1(Node)+1(CPU and Memory),5(Volumes),5(Disks) = 12 Elements

Using SAM you can perform lot many things like file size inside the disk volumes, URL Monitoring, Server process and Services monitoring etc and its licensing is based on Components.

Component is part of application template like - one process monitor or one service monitor is one component similarly it will keep adding other stuff for licensing part.

How to alert when 75% space is used - simply first add the node using either SNMP or WMI (windows box) or Agent (Windows/Linux) now manage the disk volume that you want to alert on.

Once it gets added then got to Alert Manager and create new alert based on Volumes in the trigger object - now select volume based on any criteria that you find easy and set the threshold for alerting. You can configure Email action on top of it to get the alerts to your inbox.

mesverrum · Answer

SAM and NPM both share the same core orion features when it comes to your example of monitoring disks for size and space and alerting at 75% full.  In environments with SAM and NPM licenses they basically stack anywhere there is an overlap in their licenses.  So, for example, an NPM100 would allow monitoring up to 100 nodes and 100 volumes and 100 interfaces, if you added a SAM700 license you would now be able to monitor a total of 800 nodes, 800 volumes, and 800 interfaces and you should see this reflected on the license details page.  The process for adding SAM nodes and monitoring their volumes and setting up on the alerts on it should be exactly the same as it would be with NPM as those are all considered core Orion features.