Second Instance of SW for Outside Monitoring

Question

I work for a large school district and our networking department has asked me to begin researching this topic because the guy who handles all of our other SW products has a lot on his plate already so I'm trying to help out even though I know very little about the SW platform. So I turn to the community and hope you guys and gals can reach out and help me out!

We already run SW internally to monitor devices/connections, but it was brought up about installing a second instance of SW on an external server (like on perhaps an Amazon AWS account) for outside monitoring (I hope that makes sense). I guess for things that are not under our internal network.

Really looking for any sort of help or advice the community has. Thank you in advance.

mesverrum · Answer

I would say if anything having a second external instance is significantly more of a pain to manage than just setting your existing instance up to track those things you need.  For example if they want to monitor inbound connections you can set up external netpath probes reaching in.  Anywhere you could set up another orion you could also just expand your existing instance to reach into/from.

jimmit1917 · Answer

So I'm thinking it's just for outward facing traffic. Guess I'm confused as to why you need a second instance of SW on another server to monitor outward facing network traffic. We are monitoring all inward facing traffic already. Can this be done all with one instance or is the second one on an external server needed? Or is this an instance of it can be done either way but having a second, external instance is less of a pain to manage? Appreciate the help guys and gals!

mesverrum · Answer

Solarwinds also offers a variety of cloud monitoring tools that could potentially also fit the bill and might be useful in terms of the SW admin already having a lot on their plate.  Maybe just Pingdom would be enough to keep tabs on external visibility.

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