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Where do I start to learn?

The boss has existing SolarWinds products in place but he wants me to learn the system and report back what information can be gleaned from our network. Tall order. I figured I set some tasks to find specific information. Have it report that information. But, where do istart?

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andeporter

Adam,

What existing SolarWinds products are in place? That will help me to help you blow your bosses mind!

Thx,

Ap.

FormerMember

If I understand correctly:

NPM

SAM

NTA

Virtualization

Adam Soriano

Helpdesk Technician

571.483.1525 (P)

American Society of Clinical Oncology|2318 Mill Road, Suite 700, Alexandria, VA 22314|www.asco.org<http://www.asco.org/>

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d09h

If you can run discoveries against subnets without alarming security folks, perhaps use all known credentials against each subnet to verify there aren't additional devices that could be monitored, but aren't.

For any appliances or network infrastructure you have, perhaps check to see if anyone on the forum has shared some relevant custom pollers (Network Performance Monitor ) or relevant reports (Network Performance Monitor ).

You can get traps and syslogs sent to your SolarWinds servers and report and alert on them.

FormerMember

Just to clarify though I am a total SW Noob. I appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks much for you help.

d09h

(I don't mean this to be RTFM / flippant/ rude) The forums are great, but for just getting your head around SolarWinds NPM, the admin guide will be quite helpful. You will have questions that will arise from any answers given via this forum. We've all been there. There are admin guides for other modules, but this should be helpful for understanding NPM.

https://support.solarwinds.com/@api/deki/files/10232/NPM_Administrator_Guide.pdf/

The forums can definitely enhance your understanding, but there is no substitute for an admin guide.

rschroeder

Wow--I envy you! I'd love to be in your position--to relearn the cool wonderfulness that is Solarwinds Orion!

For starters, every module has its own resource page, which can be accessed by hovering over the Product Forums link and clicking on the product you want to learn more about.

For example, NPM's Forum page begins here:

Network Performance Monitor

Plus, you've come to the right place to get good advice from folks with lots of experience in using and modifying Orion modules! Ask many questions--we're your free resource for learning!

neomatrix1217

I would watch the video playlists for your products.

solarwindsinc - YouTube

CourtesyIT

I would like to Welcome you to Thwack. I am sure you have some questions about Solarwinds and not sure where to start. I would like to recommend a couple links for bookmarking to assist you in your search. If you have any questions please let me know.

V/R

CourtesyIT

You Don't Know thwack - The Onboarding Mission

NPM Core Training

Solarwinds Labs - One Stop Shop

How to do various customizations with your Solarw...

Everything DISA STIGs for your Network

CourtesyIT

Welcome to Solarwinds...........

Follow the link to the EXCITING WORLD OF SOLARWINDS. Become a rock star to your boss.......................

cahunt

This is a nice little setup you have here. Monitor your critical network nodes and main app servers(NPM), from there you can dive into the servers and monitor the critical services specifically with SAM, Add your VM Hosts to the Virtualization Manager and watch your app stack build up to start showing where possible issues may lie. You can alert on any monitored node or server and service status.

As d09h mentioned, you can discover on your management (in or out of band) subnets to grab your network devices, and then scan your server/data center sub networks. At least add your main Core, distribution Nodes and connections. Add your access layer and their uplinks to the distribution at the very least. Make sure you monitor any critical interfaces (use discovery conditions if you are a large network to make this quicker than listing resources on all nodes - which you may be doing anyways just to pickup a few interfaces here and there. But this is far easier if you let discovery pickup most initially).

You do not have NCM to do any inventory, but you can poll for these details and generate reports that can be exported to network storage or emailed on a scheduled basis. But you only get inventory on the devices you add to the system, so make that at least anything that may have an active contract for support.

You can create NOC Views or General Views for other Techs and departments for them to check status on their key items/devices, Automate Ticket Generation via email and other more advanced options (use your ticket system to create flags or scanning the subjet line for specific text that can auto route your tickets to a specific team) based on certain conditions or status changes of the monitored devices. Report on any aspect of your monitored devices - scheduled or real time. Using NPM v12 and the Agents you can setup desktop boxes or VM's to provide more details about the end user experience.

You can monitor any network device via the internal MIB DB of the device and setting up correlating Universal Device Pollers to report on status, and device details like HW internals, Logged users, or any data stored in the MIB Tables. Specifically I have tracked VPN usage and translated these #'s to graphs that NOC and Mgmt can see.

Find your problem that needs solving, or the issue of the day and search thwack for it... if you don;t find it create a post and watch the help come in....

If you get no reply tag a few MVP's like myself cahunt or rschroeder, tinmann0715, CourtesyIT, Jfrazier ..... and anyone else you see responding or adding to any thread along with these names.... The sky is the limit to what you can do....your HW is the limit to how far you can push the size of your DB....

If you have not verified your licensing, check the details behind it and scope your monitoring before you just start adding (unless its unlimited). Critical/Core nodes first, then branch out from there and see how close you can get to the end user devices ... check your DB size now - and check every few days after adding some nodes. Also review your data retention settings in SW so your not holding on to unneeded logs, traps and old data.

Hope this helps!

Jfrazier

Most everyone else has already hit the high points with good reference points to start with.

I'd recommend spending some time learning about thwack. The You Don't Know Thwack - The on boarding mission is a great way to help you to

learn your way around this great community.

Spend some time looking at the Youtube videos.

There is also a great repository of training videos here on Thwack.

Then the forums where there is a wealth of knowledge and experience to pull from.

But then this all has already been mentioned.

Be aware though...Thwack is like crack. For others it is just a daily need.

We tend to be wise cracks, have funky humors, quick witted and not afraid to mention Bacon since it goes with everything.

cahunt

CourtesyIT

I feel another list coming on.......

FormerMember

Thanks all for your suggestions! You have given me more than I think I had expected. The community seems to live up to it's hype!

Jfrazier

Yup what cahunt said !

tinmann0715

Solarwinds is incredibly intuitive. So you are in good shape. Much of the tasks to make your boss happy you can break off into small manageable efforts. This would be my strategy:

1. Since NPM is your foundation this is where you start. Make sure you are current with your licensing and then upgrade to the latest version. Assuming you know your IP ranges and subnets setup a Network Discovery to run. IMHO, collect as much as you can on the first sweep. You can always go back and remove/filter it later.

a. Hopefully SNMP has been setup with consistent credentials across all nodes. If not, write that down as a T2D.

b. The same applies for WMI for monitoring Windows servers, especially with SAM and its AppInsight capabilities. If not, write that down as a T2D.

2. One you've done this look at your polling usage. Do you need another poller? Do you need to separate your Solarwinds App server and DB? Solarwinds performance is essential to your success.

3. Line up the servers/network devices/nodes/etc. with their business functions and the expectations of the business. Is email a Tier 1 for your company? What about internet access? Does your company run an ERP? Standard is Tier 1 - 4. Adjust monitoring and polling thresholds to be consistent with these tiers. The same applies for PRD and non-PRD. Obviously Tier 1 gets monitored more closely than a non-PRD Tier 4. Your company's business rules and expectations determine appropriate thresholds.

a. Setup appropriate alerts to goto groups and not individuals. Individuals get sick, go on vacation, quit, etc. Add to your T2D setting up: dependencies, special conditions, etc. for alerting.

b. If you have multiple locations add to your T2D seting up groups by geography too. Also, identify servers/network devices/nodes/etc. their Service Owners.

4. Configure all servers/network devices/nodes/etc. to send all SNMP Traps and Syslog Messages to Solarwinds in addition to wherever else they may already be sending it.

a. Setup alerts for KPI's important to you. Add to your T2D to have rules to only alert on Traps/Messages sent ever x seconds else your inbox will fill quickly.

5. Once all the NPM baseline is in place come back with SAM. This includes AppInsight for AD, IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. Having WMI in place is essential for success here.

a. Add to your T2D for further SAM. Follow the process you laid out in Step 3.

i. Port monitoring of 3rd party apps for Availability

ii. Event Viewer monitoring of Windows servers for KPI's important to you: BSoD, initiated reboots, memory dumps, etc. This list can get quite long

iii. Windows Services monitoring of essential Services

6. For NTA point your key network devices to send NetFlow data then wait a month to determine trends. Add to your T2D to setup regular reporting for NetFlow. Personally, I find NTA to be a better reference point for bandwidth performance than a real-time alerting tool. I am sure others will disagree.

7. Virtualization - Make sure Solarwinds can authenticate to the Host to pull all the data you need. I don't have too much experience with this product. :-(

8. As you go through this you will find oodles and oodles of opportunities for more advanced monitoring. You will bury yourself quickly. And much like myself, get frustrated that there isn't enough hours in the day to implement all of your initiatives. Also, with your baseline you will begin to find sooooo many underlying issues that exist. Keep reminding yourself, this is a good thing.

9. Once this is done then you move onto customized dashboards and reporting. And then for all your non-standard nodes like UPS'es, security devices, generators, etc. you start setting up custom pollers.

10. Buy NCM. It is a no brainer when you already have NPM and SAM. With the addition of NCM you can complete you AppStack. :-)

EBeach

I agree with option 10. If you have Solarwinds and you have network equipment you need NCM.

ken_cohen

Don't worry about being new to SolarWinds - we've all been there and done that.

In addition to what has already been mentioned, I wouldn't add a ton of devices right off the bat. Once you start to get a feel for the tools, I would start to look at the various views. Part of the what detail you'll see has to do with correctly identifying the devices and matching the correct views with devices. Then go ahead and start discovering and adding subnets and such.

Limit the monitoring of interfaces per device to only what's needed - you probably don't care about user's switchports on an edge device, but you do want to monitor the uplinks.

Put descriptions on the interfaces before you add devices so the discovery process will add the descriptions to NPM automatically. This will save you a ton of time later.

Start small with Alerts as it is all too easy to misconfigure one and then get flooded by bogus alerts.

Anything comes up, we'll be here!

Jfrazier

Hype ? What is this Hype that you speak of ?

Are you telling us that someone let it slip out that we actually are an involved and helpful forum ?

ecklerwr1

I cannot believe all of the MVP's missed the new SW resource for customers on support ie. The Success Center!

Success Center - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

It's here to pull all the info together in one place to make it easier to find... It's basically an intuitive site of info similar to Eric's lists but a little fancier!

superfly

Some excellent advice here to help you on your knowledge journer. You're lucky though as Solarwinds is a very easy program to get going on. The more you dive into it, the more you will learn.

austinzak

Yes - and here are direct links to the NPM Getting Started Guide and the SAM Getting Started Guide - specifically designed to start you at day 1 and get you moving. Even if your products are already set up, it will give you a great foundation for these products.

NPM Getting Started: Network Performance Monitor Getting Started Guide - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

SAM Getting Started: Server & Application Monitoring Getting Started Guide - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support