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New Customer w/ Feedback

hello forum

Firstly excellent product, you guys at solarwinds have done a great job. ive been at this network management thing for 7 years and have used everything from several 100 thousand dollar HP deployments to opensource tools and I cannot express enough how well thought out, easy to use and customizable your product is.

Coupled with the jumpstart guides on this site I was up and deployed in no time. VERY IMPRESSED

Now for criticism *cringe* /sorry

I will say that the netflow module is weak. I havent purchased it because Im waiting for it to be enchanced. Not trying to promote any product but Im using the free version of http://www.plixer.com/products/free-netflow.php and dont see any compelling reason to buy Solarwinds Product. Trust me, I want to.

Additionally when can we expect the wireless module to support thin AP's and wireless LAN controllers?

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I do have a request, this feature may be in the product and Im over looking it.. you tell me.

I have over 200 cisco switches and have all ports monitored under "available resources" because I dont want to fool around with managing this everytime a server guy plugs in a new server.. its just easier this way and I know eventually he is going to come ask what network utliziation is or its the ports getting errors etc.... However I dont want alerts whenever a port goes down due to moves or server reboots etc.. I WOULD like to get alerts only on specific ports, namely trunks/uplinks. I hope im explaining this okay.

All my switches are uniform, so 100 of my 2950's uplink port is 1, so it would be nice to edit this in bulk by model or whatever also.

Now for a question

Im running 8.5.1 with SP2 on a windows 2003 64bit server with dual quad core 2.8ghz procs, 8 gig of ram and 600gig raid 1 config

my polling stats are

Network Elements	11965 Elements
Nodes	422 Nodes
Interfaces	11470 Interfaces
Volumes	73 Volumes

Alerts	0 Alerts
Events	62678 Events
Pollers	24129 Pollers
Polling Engines	1 Polling Engines

Do you think Im pushing it? Should I look at another polling engine? Things seem to run fast except for the web interface. Also are there plans for a 64bit version of Orion?

Thanks

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FormerMember

Im running 8.5.1 with SP2 on a windows 2003 64bit server with dual quad core 2.8ghz procs, 8 gig of ram and 600gig raid 1 config
my polling stats are

Network Elements 11965 Elements
Nodes 422 Nodes
Interfaces 11470 Interfaces
Volumes 73 Volumes

Alerts 0 Alerts
Events 62678 Events
Pollers 24129 Pollers
Polling Engines 1 Polling Engines

Do you think Im pushing it? Should I look at another polling engine?

Firstly excellent product, you guys at solarwinds have done a great job. ive been at this network management thing for 7 years and have used everything from several 100 thousand dollar HP deployments to opensource tools and I cannot express enough how well thought out, easy to use and customizable your product is.
Coupled with the jumpstart guides on this site I was up and deployed in no time. VERY IMPRESSED

On behalf of the product team, many thanks. We take a great deal of pride in our products, but the final measure is what our end users think.

I will say that the netflow module is weak. I havent purchased it because Im waiting for it to be enchanced. Not trying to promote any product but Im using the free version of http://www.plixer.com/products/free-netflow.php and dont see any compelling reason to buy Solarwinds Product. Trust me, I want to.

Criticism is healthy. Our NetFlow module is just a little over a year old, but we are by no means done with it. We're investing in it heavily, and there's another version coming out in the first half of this year. If you're so inclined, please send me a private message, and we'll set up a meeting for you to talk with Haley, the product manager for NetFlow. She'll want to hear what we need to do to make our NetFlow module a must-have.

I have over 200 cisco switches and have all ports monitored under "available resources" because I dont want to fool around with managing this everytime a server guy plugs in a new server.. its just easier this way and I know eventually he is going to come ask what network utliziation is or its the ports getting errors etc.... However I dont want alerts whenever a port goes down due to moves or server reboots etc.. I WOULD like to get alerts only on specific ports, namely trunks/uplinks. I hope im explaining this okay.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're asking for automatic discovery of new ports. Orion should do a scan, let's say nightly, find new devices/interfaces that have been added to the network, and then alert you of those new devices. Ideally, we offer you the chance to immediately add that element to Orion or to ignore it in the future. If possible, we would provide some rules around those alerts so that we don't bother telling you about certain devices (e.g., devices in a subnet that represents the lab). If that's what you want, we have given it a bit of thought, and we are anxious to get it into the product. It won't be in the upcoming version because we had more urgent priorities, but automatic discovery and topology awareness are really high on the feature queue. Or, is my scenario off? If so, please explain what you're looking for in more detail.

All my switches are uniform, so 100 of my 2950's uplink port is 1, so it would be nice to edit this in bulk by model or whatever also.

Making bulk changes will be much easier in the next version of Orion, which (since I"m sure you'll ask) is due out in the first half of the year.

Im running 8.5.1 with SP2 on a windows 2003 64bit server with dual quad core 2.8ghz procs, 8 gig of ram and 600gig raid 1 config
my polling stats are

Network Elements 11965 Elements
Nodes 422 Nodes
Interfaces 11470 Interfaces
Volumes 73 Volumes

Alerts 0 Alerts
Events 62678 Events
Pollers 24129 Pollers
Polling Engines 1 Polling Engines

Do you think Im pushing it? Should I look at another polling engine?

Based on your numbers, you probably are pushing it. However, the usual symptom of going too far is that you'll see missing data. If you're not seeing that, it's probably not necessary. But you didn't mention your database. Is it on the same server as Orion? If so, you could boost performance by moving it to a separate server with lots of RAM.

Also are there plans for a 64bit version of Orion?

I'm sure we'll eventually do that, but it's not on the roadmap for the next 18 months. And you should be wary of any product manager who claims to tell you about what's going to happen beyond 18 months--especially if the PM seems to believe what he or she is saying. ;-)

Drid

Ive got a seperate database running on some hefty hardware in the datacenter. Not seeing any missing data.

Utilization look pretty low on the box orion is on. Ill give it some time but I will be adding another 100 servers soon.

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I think you have the right idea on the switches. Let me give another example. Lets say I have just one 24 port switch. It has 2 ports uplinked into my backbone and the rest are available for server guys to plug things into. I always want to know the up/down status and performance metrics of the two ports uplinked into my backbone but I only want performance metrics out of the ports with servers plugged into them.. Frankly I dont even care if the server ports go down.

Now... i accomplish this by putting a check mark under all the ports in Orions "available resources" area. The problem is the annoying event notifications if a server gets moved or rebooted.

I hope that helps.

Additionally in my original post I forgot to ask about support for Thick AP's and Cisco Wireless LAN controllers. I have 6 of them and the WCS appliance. From what Ive read it appears the wireless module is for Fat AP;s only.

On the netflow stuff. There doesnt seem to be any real integration with the rest of the product. If I pull up a server I want a link or a "Top Ten" of conversations. protocols etc right there. The Plixer product actually does this with your product.

FormerMember

If you've already got your database separated, then we'd need to drill down on what's actually feeling slow. Is it every page? Or just certain pages? If it's the latter, detach each resource on the page (by clicking the resource title) and see how long each resource takes to load. That would pinpoint if a particular resource is causing problems. We do know that the All Nodes resource was running slow, and one of the Orion Dev Leads--Tim Danner--built a new AJAX-enabled version that we shipped with SP3. That new versions seems to be faster. So that could help.

I think you have the right idea on the switches. Let me give another example. Lets say I have just one 24 port switch. It has 2 ports uplinked into my backbone and the rest are available for server guys to plug things into. I always want to know the up/down status and performance metrics of the two ports uplinked into my backbone but I only want performance metrics out of the ports with servers plugged into them.. Frankly I dont even care if the server ports go down.
Now... i accomplish this by putting a check mark under all the ports in Orions "available resources" area. The problem is the annoying event notifications if a server gets moved or rebooted.

I think you can accomplish what you want today with custom properties. Assign the key ports one custom property and the rest another custom property. You then add the custom property as a condition in your alerts,and you'll be alert on only those ports that you really care about.

Additionally in my original post I forgot to ask about support for Thick AP's and Cisco Wireless LAN controllers. I have 6 of them and the WCS appliance. From what Ive read it appears the wireless module is for Fat AP;s only.

We're not planning to add controller-based APs in 2008, but we'll be re-visiting the issue given the demand.

On the netflow stuff. There doesnt seem to be any real integration with the rest of the product. If I pull up a server I want a link or a "Top Ten" of conversations. protocols etc right there. The Plixer product actually does this with your product.

A couple of points. First, NetFlow Traffic Analyzer 3.0 will be adding Top Conversations to all views. And as for integration, you can do this today. Go to Admin > Manage Views. You can add NetFlow resources to your Node Details views and to your Interface Details views. Then, when you're looking at a router/interface, you'll see the NetFlow data for that element.

Are you suggesting that when you look at an server, you want to see the conversations that the server is involved in? Or just see the Top 10 conversations, regardless of whether the server is involved? The latter will definitely be available in 3.0. It's getting close--Haley's already begun the Beta Program .

abchurch

Please add support for Cisco WCS...need some kind of integration