Integrating Outside Data into SAM

Good day.

I've been working with the Solarwinds SAM product for about a year. So far I like it a lot - especially the nice clean web consoles.

Looking for some guidance on how to start integrating outside data into Solarwinds SAM or if that is possible.

For example: let's say I have some servers configured as Windows Domain Controllers - DC1, DC2, DC3, DC4 . These exist in Solarwinds - may have agent polling or may have SNMP polling.

I want to make a custom chart showing, for example, "LDAP Searches per Second".

This data does not get collected by Solarwinds. However, my company has a SCOM monitoring installation (Microsoft System Center Operations Manager) that does collect this counter for these servers.

Why do I want to do this? a) because SCOM is great at collecting lots of data from servers, but the consoles and reports are ugly. Solarwinds has nice looking reports and consoles. b) my management does not want yet-another agent running on their Domain Controllers - "we have that data in SCOM - go get it there".

Can anyone offer guidance on how I might fetch perf data out of SCOM (Operational DB or Data Warehouse) and use that data in Solarwinds consoles and reports? Thanks much.

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osborne_graham

I'm pretty sure you can get the LDAP search count through perform counters so you could do this via Solarwinds using a custom Performance Counter Monitor.

robert777

Yes. Understood. However, my requirement is to not go out to the source server with Solarwinds polling and collect the data. I have to get the data from another monitoring tool - in this case SCOM.

Perhaps a bigger question is - Does Solarwinds have the potential to act as an integration hub for data from different systems, similar to NetCool, Riverbed, or Splunk, or does that capability not exist in the Orion platform?

Thanks in advance.

osborne_graham

You could make your own app monitor to directly query the SCOM database via either a custom query or a powershell monitor but it'd probably be more resource hungry than just polling the stats directly from the DC's.

hpstech

This counter is in SolarWinds.......

osborne_graham

The Serivce and Counters app monitor pulls the stats via perfom stats as per my first reply but you said that you didn't want to pull the perfmon stats Well, I'm glad you got what you needed anyway...

hpstech

I read the post incorrectly, I see he wants data from SCOM for non-monitored nodes in Solar.

I would simply embed SCOM performance data in Custom HTML resources.

Create the SCOM perf widget in SCOM with desired counters, get the HTML for the SCOM widget, embed that into html resource.

osborne_graham

Sorry, I read your post incorrectly too - I thought it was robert777 replying to his own post having found an answer Sorry, I am doing too many things at the same time...

robert777

No problem. Thank you for your assistance.

Based on the correspondence received I believe that 1) pulling perf counters directly from servers (assuming Solarwinds agent loaded) is fairly lightweight in terms or resources, 2) pulling same perf counter from a SCOM database would require a) powershell component monitor, which b) leverages the SQL module to construct a query against the SCOM operational or data warehouse database which is probably a more resource-intensive operation than (a). Also, 3) Solarwinds does not offer a collection of data probes to pull data from external data sources (i.e. not a universal omnibus product like Tivoli Netcool). If you really want a data collector for SCOM, Splunk, Riverbed, etc. then learn C+ and write the connector yourself.

Cheers.

frak

You could also so a SQL Experience monitor - pointed to the SCOM SQL Server, and pull the data directly out of SCOM that way. Should not add any effective load to the SCOM system.