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Leveraging Orion

Hi,

We have a client in Singapore which has many branches in South-East Asia.

Their requirement is for us to monitor their sub-branches data center servers and networks.

Our task is to leverage on the current purchase Orion. We need to perform the monitoring of the remote components by getting the agents remotely to collect data for all the servers and networks and we will poll to this agent.

If any of you know such products please do advise.

Thank you very much,

Best regards,

[] [_] [--

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Isaac

Hello OCT_7,

If you want to achieve this with Orion, the only thing I can think of is to place a polling engine at each of these locations.

There are several problems with this method.

1. If you have many branch data centers you will spend a substantial amount of money purchasing polling engine licenses.

2. I am not certain how many polling engines a single Orion server can support.

So my question is this: Why don't you just use a single Orion server with one or two appropriately placed polling engines? Orion does not place a significant load on the network and is capable of polling more than 10,000 elements without any issues.

Unless each of these sites has its own firewall with a policy that will not let the Orion polling engines into the network I don't see any reason to have remote agents.

Be fantastic.

Oct_7

Hi Isaac,

Thank you for your reply. Can you tell me what is the vulnerability if I open the firewall for Orion to monitor the network? I am going to use the SNMP to get the data. Is there any special configuration?

Thank you,

Regards,

[] [_] [--

Isaac

Oct_7,

Here is the deal:

As long as you keep the Orion box secure there is little or no issue in allowing it to probe devices with both ICMP (ping) and SNMP.

Limit the firewall rule to only allow ICMP and SNMP from the Orion polling engines to your customer networks. We have similar rules on several of our firewalls to allow the Orion server to monitor elements located on secure networks.

The Orion server has all MS security patches applied immediately. Further it has both a virus scanning package and an IPS (intrusion prevention system) agent running to provide a reasonable expectation that this host remains free of unauthorized software.

I hope this helps.

Be fantastic.

Network_Guru

Hey Irwan, welcome to the forums.

The general rule of security is to only allow a more trusted network access a less trusted network. Therefore you should be able to monitor the devices in the DMZ's without too much concern for security. Only allow ICMP, & SNMP outbound from your Orion server through your FW to your servers, switches & routers.

-=Cheers=-
NG

cnorborg

I've been told by Solarwinds Engineers that putting polling engines in remote locations is not a good idea. Something about the polling engine requiring LAN performance access to the SQL server. If this isn't true, I'd love to hear it, but they were quite adamant about it when I asked before.

quote:Originally posted by Isaac

Hello OCT_7,

If you want to achieve this with Orion, the only thing I can think of is to place a polling engine at each of these locations.

Craig Norborg
Network Analyst
Robert Bosch Corporation

Isaac

Hi Craig,

You are correct. Or SW is correct.

In any case placing polling engines at remote locations with slow links (less than a DS3) is not a good idea. I have run experiments over our DS3 connections, metro Fast Ethernet, and transport Gigabit Ethernet.

GE works great.
Fast Ethernet works greats.
DS3 is OK but there were some missed polls and data inconsistency issues when adding large numbers of devices.

When I attempted this over a bonded T1 link (3 Mbps) things went rapidly down hill.

SO, OCT_7 should take the advice of the great and powerful Network_Guru and the much less great Isaac and place his polling engines at the center of the universe and poll out to the edges / DMZ networks.

DonYonce

Having a WAN link between a polling engine and the SQL server is not a good idea.
But, many SolarWinds customers place remote Orion servers, each with its own SQL server across a WAN link.

In this situation, the remote polling engine has its own SQL server. Customers then will remotely roll-up the data they need via queries to the remote SQL server.

SolarWinds also has a few customers that create their own master web site that drills down into each remote server.

pran

Is there a whitepaper about this configuration? I also have a client with a similar requirement.