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Orion Wish List – Top 5 features

Hi everyone. I’m the new product manager for Orion. Josh has already given you some ideas about what we’re going to be delivering in Orion 8.0. One of our goals is to provide a longer-term roadmap so that you have some idea of what’s coming in future versions.

Consequently, while we are finishing up 8.0, I am thinking about Orion 9.0 and beyond. I’ve been contacting customers individually regarding what they’d like to see in the future. I’m also about to send a survey out to a random sample of customers asking them similar questions.

I know those of you in the forums frequently ask for features, and we do read the forums and take note of those requests. But since I’m working on the roadmap right now, I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask folks to take a few minutes and share your wish list.

Give me your top 5 requests. Please think broadly. These features might be changes to Orion or they might be add-ons to Orion that address new network management problems.

Denny LeCompte
Sr. Product Manager, Orion
SolarWinds

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fcunningham

how about being able to upload or down load configs for cisco and hp from inside orion with out having to lauch the toolset.

Ford Cunningham
T. Marzetti Company

olb42

I think being about to graphically change the interface links colour in maps based on utilisation.

Also if you could nodes and services as a grouping so you could have a red amber and green light system for all the components of a mail system for example (mail server smtp up, mail filtering up, firewall up, router up, dns up). Or a web service(proxy port 80, firewall up, router up). This would be good for support.

Being about to create links between sites based on more than if the interface is up or down (ie www traffic is polled)

jonchill

My top four would be (Can't think of a fifth)

A full Web enabled management frontend ie add, remove new devices, mapmaker, report writer everything you have to do from the Orion server.

Complete integration between Cirrus & Orion.

More export to web option of the toolset giving the ability to view in Orion ie IP address managemnt, DHCP scope monitor etc any of the engineers tools that regularly update there information.

The ability to use Windows AD groups for login instead of having to setup each individual account in Orion.

Jon

IT Infrastructure Manager
Pilgrim Hospital
UK

zexbig

My top5 should be:

1. NetFlow/Sflow/IPFIX support so that we are able to see type of traffic that is going trough netwoks. This will very useful for detecting strange network behaviors (eg. worm on the network will significantly increase SMB traffic). This feature is something that is absolutly required in gov/mil networks today and large enterprises also *NEED* this funconality.

2. Feature to import custom MIB's into databases.

3. SNMP v3 support.

4. More functions from web interface (Enable/disable interface is great but I would like to see more options).

5. Options to create graphs for custom MIB's.

FormerMember

First off I would like to thank you all for the new information about version 8, I'm really looking forward to it and was excited to see some new solid information about it.

Aside from the already announced features here a couple I woudln't mind seeing.

1) Make it easier to adjust time frames of graphs with a single click. I.e. to be able to move forward or backward 24 hours in time on the graph with a single click

2) Allow multiple interface graphs on a single page. I think this can sort of be done with reports at this time, but I know I often want to be able to see the past 24 hours of activity on all 24 or 48 interfaces of a switch on a single page for troubleshooting purposes. I haven't found a way yet to do this with custom views.

3) Netflow graphing and reporting

4) AD intergrated logins that support AD groups. I've gotten pass-through authentication to work, but I can't get it to work with a group instead of a username. I.e. if I have 50 people on my helpdesk, I would like to be able to create a single helpdesk "account" in Orion with custom views, etc, and then assign my helpdesk AD group to that account, so if any of those 50 users in that group log in they receive the permissions and views of the helpdesk Orion account.

aLTeReGo

TCP Port Monitoring is #1 for me. Being able to determine if a HTTP/FTP/SMTP/etc server is up and running via TCP port monitoring would be huge!

vbowers

Denny,
The intended additions for V8 really hit my biggest holes. If I were to add more features I would look at:
1. Additional monitoring features for non-SNMP enabled devices (by device ability to ping device on a given port(s), by device ability to change # of pings).
2. By device adjustable monitoring (frequency of testing, # of queries per test, etc) to allow us to more closely monitor critical devices/services without doing this on all devices/services.
3. Allow us to add more information to the devices shown on maps, such as public/private IP info, installed services, etc on Node Details.
4. Network discovery. Find my devices/computers for me, including those that I don't know about and aren't authorized. I might not add them to a map or monitor them, but I've got legislation and 3rd party rules that require this discovery. Tell me enough about them that I have a fighting chance of locating and identifying them.
5. Work with Visio. That would add a whole new level of capabilities to map making and visualization.

casmith32

My top 5 would be:

1) Service port monitoring - we have the capability to moniter services/apps running on a node, but we can't "poll" a tcp port. Many other competative products do this, and It would be very valuable to many folks. For example, be able to poll a node on tcp port 80 for a response. If no response, we could generate an alert. Or maybe I want to poll a specific resource like mynode.com/.../mytestpage.htm

2) Integration b/t Cirrus and Orion. This one is HUGE! Seems to me that integration of the nodes table in each product should be the minimum. I should be able to add a node into Orion, and have that node immediately availabe for ops in Cirrus w/out having to import the node. Preserves consistency with my nodes inventory and is way more efficient. If I remove a node from Orion, then I should have the option to remove it from Cirrus. I suppose there may be a need for some folks to not monitor a node in orion, but still want to backup configs on a node in cirrus, but I'd think that would be way fewer folks than those that would want seemles integrated operations.

3) Alternative DB support. SQL server is costly. I'd like to see better support for database servers like MYSQL. With all the features SW coming forth, the DB server will be more important than ever, and scaling it may be costly. Having another option other than Microsoft would be nice to our checkbooks!

4) A more relational DB for custom properties. I'm not sure how this would be done, maybe integrated as a part of the products, or easily customized w/out having to be a DB expert. I know we can probably alter the DB now, but i'd be afraid that any future upgrades, etc would wipe out our customization. Currently we attach a number of custom props to a node - a lot of which are not unique to a single node such as site id, local contact, address, etc. Right now I have to copy and paste the same exact information for every node at a site that has the same information (address, contact, site id, etc) which is a pain. We should be able to relate or point a custom property entry to another record somehow. This would be VERY powerful on a number of levels.

5) Alert engine dependencies/ Auto discovery - Would be nice to have Orion have the capability to allow the user to set dependencies for connectivity. This is key in alerting and would seriously minimize the amount of alert rules to create. For instance I have a router at a site. It'd be nice to be able to have a dependency field for a node and set that to the router at that site. This could allow simplified alert suppression, as well as a faster time to find the cause of an issue.

I have more

but I'll limit this to the 5 you requested.

Chad Smith
Sr. Net Engineer
Vertis, Inc.

chandih

Denny:

We've been happily using Orion since 2003 and each successive upgrade has given us a little more functionality which is great (trap/alerting was a big one). We do have a few pain points that have recently brought our team together to discuss other options.

Since I manage Orion - I have the unique knowledge that they don't - Orion is quite possibly the easiest monitoring/alerting software to maintain. I want to keep it!

Here is what they are saying is absolutely necessary:
CUSTOM MIBS
Custom MIBS would open a HUGE door for us to monitor all of our VoIP and Filer information that right now is in the dark. Without Custom Mibs, Orion may be replaced soon.

Here is what they are saying is nice to have:
Management from a web interface.
Instead of having to login to the server to add nodes/change information, etc. This would also enable a larger number of people to help manage updates.

Thank you for soliciting and listening to our feedback,
Chandi

Network_Guru

Most of the top 5 features I was looking for are already covered here, but I just came across a cool idea. I just installed RSS ticker on my PC. Having Orion generate a custom XML RSS news feed would be a great feature. You could then keep one eye on the pulse of your network, without having Orion open all day. It would need a tool to select what you see in the news feed.

Last 10 nodes down
Last 10 Syslog messages
Top 10 Latency
Top 10 Packet Loss
Top 10 interface utilization
Top 10 CPU utilization
Top 10 Netflow talkers

Of course the admin could customize this to display any number & types of messages/info contained in the DB.

-=Cheers=- NG

kempj18

Map maker is sometimes a little cumbersome to work with. A rewrite of that piece would be greatly appreciated. For instance, I'd love to be able to select all nodes on a map and change their icon at one time. One of my maps has 110 nodes on it, and to try and change one at a time takes forever.

Next would be more layouts for pages. Right now you get 1, 2 or 3 columns. It would be nice if I could also add a header and footer to any of these. Maybe also have rows. Upto 10 rows would be awesome. Then have each row be able to be defined with 1, 2 or 3 columns would be the best.

I know you sell a tool for monitoring process, but my customer won't allow me to spend anymore money on that. I'd love it if you gave me a little bit of application process watching. Maybe just a screen to show what is using the majority of Memory and CPU resources. Nothing too fancy.

jimmo

I only have two:

1. It is thoroughly tested before it ships. With each new release I find bugs that should never have made it out the door even with the most basic testing.

2. Support for Net-SNMP versions that are newer that a few years old. I don't accept the comment from SolarWinds support "we can't support every third party product". It is perhaps the most widely used SNMP version and to use versions that several years old is not very useful.

FormerMember

Cool idea is right NG! I like it. Listen up SW!

zhct1

I feel that the report writer is on of the most important features of Orion V7 as I monitor over 6000 elements, including more than 300 leased lines which I constantly review for usage. What I would love to see in V8 is a more powerful, slicker, and less time consuming report writer. I spend a lot of my time adding individual conditions to enable the reports to only show certain nodes, and being able to add these from a node list or similar would be a great help.

It would also be good to see the web based graphs and charts, the report writer's reports and the system manager graphs combined into the report writer, so that there is one place to generate all the report data.

rstier

Most have touched on the 5 I would like to see. A better way to do event suppression would really help us. For example, when the core switch goes down, supress all the connected devices. I realize you can set this up today by node but that is rather cumbersome in a large environment.
Thanks,
Ron

Network_Guru

quote:Originally posted by zhct1

I feel that the report writer is on of the most important features of Orion V7 as I monitor over 6000 elements, including more than 300 leased lines which I constantly review for usage. What I would love to see in V8 is a more powerful, slicker, and less time consuming report writer. I spend a lot of my time adding individual conditions to enable the reports to only show certain nodes, and being able to add these from a node list or similar would be a great help.
It would also be good to see the web based graphs and charts, the report writer's reports and the system manager graphs combined into the report writer, so that there is one place to generate all the report data.

You've got my vote on these zhct1!

Also being able to create exception reports is a must have.
Show me the elements which have exceeded a pre-defined threshold over the past week.
Being able to combine multiple reports on one page/e-mail would be even better.
This would make it suitable for Executive consumption straight out of the box, every Monday morning.

Top 10 - CPU, interface utilization, latency. packet Loss, sysloggers, netflow talkers.
Where appropriate show me the value & the date & time of the exception.

-=Cheers=-
NG

salyerma

Couple things I would like to see.

1. Script engine. Allow me to write VB script to return values to solarwinds. Example: My script could download a web page (say the company web page) and return a 1 if it was successful or a 0 if not. Then I could really monitor anything I wanted with full alerting.

2. I would like a basic web cam interface so that I could pull a picture from a security cam and add it to the node details page. Not full motion video but maybe a single frame url camera pull. (ie my cameras use a url to return a single frame. Very handy)

3. Quarter reports. I cannot pull current and previous quarter reports without manually setting the date. My users can't do that, so I have to *edit* the report every time. Either give me a Quarter variable (maybe a 0 to 10 number signifying what quarter) or let the users change the dates of reports.

Sorry, could not stop at 2.

Mark Salyer

jflet1

Hi Denny,

My top 4 (as an enterprise customer, using Orion to monitor a LAN/WAN environment that spans 11 countries)

1 Custom port polling
We've just spent $1000 dollars on a direct competitors product so that we can poll web servers on port 80, Terminal servers on port 3389, etc. A simple ping, as provided by Orion is not good enough for enterprise monitoring. That's $1000 we could have given solarwinds. and we now have two monitoring tools in place

2 Orion/Cirrus integration
Its a big pain trying to keep Orion & Cirrus in sync. They both share a SQL database -it will be a big help when we have only one database to maintain

3 Polling custom MIBS
Well, you know about this anyway

4 Scripted polling
The ability to determine server/service health by sending sequences of bytes, and checking the reply. eg. attempting to open a web page, reading an email, etc. Again - a necessity for enterprise monitoring.

Regards,

Julian Fletcher
Robert Half International

mreitz

I'd like to see some real management for the mapping functions. For instance, what maps is a node on? What are the links between the maps? What maps contain deleted nodes? A search and replace nodes on maps function would be great.

When you get to have tens and hundreds of maps, it becomes a major task to manage them all with what we have now in v7.

Thanks,

Malcolm

FormerMember

I just wanted to let everyone know that we are reading these suggestions. We've also done some web surveys of existing Orion customers.

All of the feedback is great and is feeding our plans on version 9 and beyond. Keep 'em coming.

We do plan to publish a roadmap for the next couple of releases once our plans are firm.

Thanks,
Denny

Denny LeCompte
Sr. Product Manager, Orion
SolarWinds

pmartrvr

Everyone seems to be covering the meat and potatoes, there are two long term things I'd like to see integrated with Solarwinds.

1. Trouble ticketing system integration - interface or partner with an existing trouble ticket system to allow either automatic generation of trouble tickets for violations or exceptions. I'm sure this could be done with some scripting and the new alert engine, but it's a bonus for most companies considering large scale implementations.

2. Visio maps - the ability to load/reference a visio map embedded into an activex control in the web front end or as a standalone application. Macros/utilities to either build a visio map from the data in the Solarwinds database dynamically (to resolve synchronization issues) or to give a user the ability to link nodes, interfaces, or circuits on a visio map to objects in the Solarwinds database and have the map update automatically. [we did this by adding some SQL triggers, an executable which monitors for triggered events, and a multicast distribution to a Visio add-in which runs on our network monitoring/helpdesk stations - our development effort to do this was significant enough that we won't be able to do it again]

Thanks!

Drexel

We would love an audible alert feature that would be generated from the Web server for an alert!!

Dave Ririe

jlgugler

1. Cirrus and orion integration (same node database)
2. Better "customization" of the web view.
3. possibility to have a web view with some chart, ordered with "tabs" and the possibility to make a "slide show" to install in the noc center.
4. More symbole and map possibilites.
5. A smarter system to handle syslog and alert

ACDII

My biggest thing that would make Orion the best would be to sound an alert through the web interface, much in the same way that What'sup does. We want to place a flat screen setup in our tech room showing the web interface 24X7 and if something goes down, to alert us via the PC's speakers. Most times we miss the email alerts due to us being involved in other tickets and may miss the alert when it omes through. Having the ability to sound off when a node goes down would be extremely helpful.

What others have mentioned, NetFlow, and SNMPV3, and MySQL integration.

mkocsis

Two items on my wish list are...

1) The ability to schedule maint (non managed time) instead of just being able to start NOW. (I have to get up at 3:00 AM to put some devices into non-managed mode)

2) The ability to do a SNMP acknowledgement to the alerts (I believe that V8 will have web site acknowledgement). My engineers have blackberrys and email is their best friend.

Thank you.

Network_Guru

Automatic Advanced Network Troubleshooting - AANT

Run advanced troubleshooting tools when predefined thresholds are exceeded.

1 - Run the traceroute tool when any node exceeds 10% packet loss and record results to DB.
2 - Grab the top 10 talkers from Netflow when a link exceeds 85% util. & write to Orion DB.
3 - Run the "show proc cpu" command with Cirrus when router CPU exceeds 80% & record to Orion DB.

This follows along the line of exception reporting.
Collect detailed stats only when exceptions occur.

-=Cheers=-
NG

lucya

I would like to be able to integrate HP System Insight Manager

FormerMember

I have to agree with NetworkGuru that AANT type functionality would be extremely useful.

PaulWeaver

1) Application status integrated on maps
2) Ability to exclude nodes from exporting their map status. If there's a problem with a centralised device like a router, I don't want every map to go red.
3) to add to Network_Gurus post, continually collect detailed stats, however discard within 2 hours unless an exception occurs, that way we can see the events building up to the failure
4) Support for another kind of database, postgresql, mysql5, oracle, etc.
5) Grouping of nodes. At the moment I've got ~200 nodes in a big long list, it would be nice if I could assign them to groups, then include those groups in alerts (e.g. set alert to page me when any web server goes down and then be able to simply a server to a "webserver" group.) Helps with managment and map making too.

michael.buskin

Customer Area Intergration

I hate having to remember my customer id and password, so why not intergrated ith with System Manager, so a user would click a menu option and be automaticly redirect tot eh customer area

Regards,

Michael Buskin
+61415369688