Dependencies for Thin AP's

I'm still very new to Orion. We are transitioning off of WhatsUp Gold to Solarwinds. I am in the process of setting up dependencies for all our network devices. Most of it is pretty straightforward, but I am lost when it comes to wireless. In WhatsUp, we had each individual AP added as a node, so we could go into the properties of each AP and add an UP dependency. I did not add the individual WAPs in Orion because it picked up everything from the WLC. Unfortunately, because the APs only appear in Orion because of the controller, they do not appear in the list in manage dependencies when I try to setup a parent/child relationship. We want to suppress additional notifications if the WLC goes down, but also if the switch that the AP is connected to goes down. I'm sure I'm just missing something simple.

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jbrowni2

Would I need to add the individual APs as ICMP nodes in order to see them in the child menu for dependencies? If so, would that duplicate the data I was getting from the WLC?

temark

As someone who also had to deal with Whats Up Gold in the past I congratulate you on moving to a reliable and stable monitoring platform :-)

SolarWinds NPM does not monitor the APs as individual nodes - it monitors the controller, and discovers the APs from the controller's database.

The way we handle the alerting is to set low level alerts for the APs themselves, then set regular alerting on the switchports where the APs are connected. Then the switches are part of a child group dependent on the core switch, or router depending on the site design, so that alerting is suppressed if the site becomes unreachable.

We did try doing discovery of some APs as ICMP only nodes, but since our APs get their IP addresses via DHCP we had to make DHCP reservations for those APs, and we decided not to do that for all 1600+ APs we have.

DirtySouth

temark, I'm not clear on what you did here with the alerting for thin AP's. What do you mean by creating low level alerts making the AP dependent upon the switch? I would also like to be able to include Thin AP's in dependency groups.

dgsmith80

DirtySouth, The AP itself never exist in your system as a permanent node, only as a listing of the AP's discovered by the Controller when it is polled. This means it isn't a device you can add to a group.

You can currently create alerts for Thin AP's when they are removed from the system or go offline, but they are highly unreliable because again SolarWinds is only scanning the Controller, and if your AP's can roam between Controllers you start to get all sorts of problems.

From an alerting perspective, if you were to tag all the interfaces that have Access Points connected, you could create a specific AP Interface alert for when those switch ports go down. That way you can then put the switches into a dependency so that if they go down, the AP interface alerts don't trigger.

Hope that makes sense.