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External Node vs Agent monitoring for Workstations

Currently I am monitoring multiple workstations that are often only powered on during the day. We do not need any CPU, RAM, up-time etc. statistics for these. What we do use this for is an SAM application that checks that specific services are running on the machines when they are turned on. To date this has been done by installing the agent on each workstation. Currently running 2019.4.1 HF2.

Can this be done using the External Node option?

If so:

Will this have an increase or decrease on the load for the Solarwinds Servers?
Is this going to create more or less network traffic?
Can a bulk number of workstations be converted at a time without having to edit each individually?

My goals are to make this process as light and efficient as possible.

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Accepted answers

hpstech

I do not believe you can monitor Windows services with external node type.

All comments

hpstech

I do not believe you can monitor Windows services with external node type.

martian_monster

For External node status you can monitor a very small amount of items - Success Center

Depending on connectivity to the workstations you probably would use Agent or WMI for the best results.

tjkru

Thanks for the information. That is what I thought I was going to find out.

serena

tjkru wrote:
Currently I am monitoring multiple workstations that are often only powered on during the day. We do not need any CPU, RAM, up-time etc. statistics for these. What we do use this for is an SAM application that checks that specific services are running on the machines when they are turned on. To date this has been done by installing the agent on each workstation. Currently running 2019.4.1 HF2.
Can this be done using the External Node option?
If so:
Will this have an increase or decrease on the load for the Solarwinds Servers?
Is this going to create more or less network traffic?
Can a bulk number of workstations be converted at a time without having to edit each individually?
My goals are to make this process as light and efficient as possible.

I haven't run through the steps here to test it out, but one option might be instead of using an External node, setting the node as an ICMP node and then checking the services using a powershell script monitor to check the services. That may be more lightweight than an agent, but again I haven't tested this. I'm assuming you're just trying to make the monitoring as simplistic as possible with very little impact to the server itself? We do have this documentation on Agent resource consumption that can possibly help. SolarWinds Orion agent requirements