SLA Exception Reporting/Capacity Planning

Network_Guru

Orion is a great tool for Network monitoring, alerting & some limited reporting.

However it is lacking several major features, to make this an Enterprise Reporting tool.

In addition to the many features requested in this post:

www2.solarwinds.net/.../topic.asp
(Netflow, Cisco IP SLA, Network Services Monitoring, Custom MIBs, etc.)

there is one major feature which should be quite easy to implement without a huge rewrite of the code.

That is Exception(SLA) Reporting.
In the same way you can set alerts to fire only when predefined thresholds are exceeded, we should be able to create reports based on SLA thresholds.

For example, only show me the nodes which have exceeded 60ms latency over the past month, including the dates & times of these exceptions.
I.E. - I am not interested in reports showing me %100 uptime, or utilization below %80.
Only report on the nodes, interfaces, volumes which exceed my predefined SLA.

I talked to SW support several years ago to try and accomplish this with the existing Reports built into Report Writer, but was not able to make this work.
The queries created with Report Writer did not have the advanced SQL syntax required to do this.

The next logical step is the ability to drill down into the exception period.
For link utilization this would require a tool such as Netflow to view the cause of the increased traffic. For latency exceptions, Cisco IP SLA could give detailed stats of the exception using TCP polls at 30-60 second intervals, rather than the unreliable ICMP protocol.
(Granted this second part requires considerable R&D investment, there is other software on the market which has this capability).

This drill down feature is required for our Quarterly Capacity Planning meetings with the Directors & VPs. Showing them a graph of the last quarters network utilization is not enough. They want to know what caused the spike to %93 seen 43 days ago...?
Or what caused the 3 hour network outage 75 days ago in the Winnipeg Call Center?
(the ability to add custom comments to Network events/alerts would be huge).

I'll be submitting this to the development team at SW.

-=Cheers=-
NG

DonYonce

Oooooh. Now you got me excited.
We definitely need to look into this also.