NPM and Agent

I have NPM in my environment and not SAM. We use our Orion Environment for Network Infrastructure Management.
I do understand that with the agent that the NetPath feature becomes available.

My problem is that I loss any interface monitoring on a device where the agent is used.

So here are my questions -

Have I miss configured the Agent in that it is not providing interface information?
Within an NPM environment what is gained by using the Agent?

Thank You for your time and help

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Accepted answers

conguir

NPM does not allow you to monitor interfaces from servers unless you monitor those servers using SNMP. Therefore, using WMI or the agent to monitor servers if you only have NPM will not allow you to monitor interfaces.

Using the agent allows you to:

Get more information from servers, if SAM is also installed:
- Disk performance
- OS patches
- Incoming connections
Solve communication issues if you were using WMI (random ports, NAT incompatibility, bandwitdh, latency sensitive)
Netpath probes
Quality of experience

Raul Gonzalez

Prosperon - UK SolarWinds Partners

Installation | Consultancy | Training | Licenses

All comments

conguir

Using the agent allows you to:

Get more information from servers, if SAM is also installed:
- Disk performance
- OS patches
- Incoming connections
Solve communication issues if you were using WMI (random ports, NAT incompatibility, bandwitdh, latency sensitive)
Netpath probes
Quality of experience

Raul Gonzalez

Prosperon - UK SolarWinds Partners

Installation | Consultancy | Training | Licenses

saw10

So unless I need a server to be a NetPath source there is no real use of the agent when in an NPM only environment?

conguir

kind of, unless you can't use WMI and don't want to use SNMP. You still need the agent to monitor QoE though.

Raul Gonzalez

Prosperon - UK SolarWinds Partners

Installation | Consultancy | Training | Licenses

d09h

Comparison of Windows agent versus agentless - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

Comparison of Windows agent versus agentless

Updated July 11, 2018

Overview

The following table displays a comparison of which features are available for the Windows agent versus agentless.

Please note that some of
the features listed below will vary depending on which Orion Platform
Modules are installed within your environment & also which versions
of each Orion application is running

For Example:

NPM supports polling via
WMI, SNMP and agent. However, interface polling via WMI and Agent is
not supported unless you have SAM license. You will have to use SNMP as
a node polling method to obtain interfaces' data in an NPM only
installation.

For more info please refer to Polling methods used by Orion

Environment

SolarWinds Orion Platform products using Orion Core 2016.2 and later

Detail

		Windows agent	Windows agentless - WMI	Windows agentless - SNMP
1	Node Name/Caption	Yes	Yes	Yes
2	Node Status	Yes	Yes	Yes
3	Response Time/Latency (ICMP)	Yes	Yes	Yes
4	Response Time/Latency (SNMP)	No	No	Yes
5	Response Time/Latency (Agent)	Yes	No	No
6	Packet Loss	Yes	Yes	Yes
7	IP Addresses	Yes	Yes	Yes
8	IP Address Type (IPv4 or IPv6)	Yes	Yes	Yes
9	Machine Type	Yes	Yes	Yes
10	DNS Name	Yes	Yes	Yes
11	Description	Yes	Yes	Yes
12	Location	Yes	Yes	Yes
13	Contact	No	No	Yes
14	Last Boot	Yes	Yes	Yes
15	Number of CPUs	Yes	Yes	Yes
16	CPU Usage	Yes	Yes	Yes
17	Individual CPU Core Usage	Yes	Yes	Yes
18	Memory Usage	Yes	Yes	Yes
19	Total Memory	Yes	Yes	Yes
20	Vendor	Yes	Yes	Yes
21	Availability	Yes	Yes	Yes
22	Quality of Experience (QoE)	Yes	Yes	Yes
23	Universal Device Poller	No	No	Yes
24	Device Studio/Custom Pollers	No	No	Yes
25	VMware Virtualization Monitoring (Basic)	Yes	Yes	Yes
26	Hyper-V Virtualization Monitoring (Basic)	Yes	Yes	No
27	Hardware Health	Yes	Yes	Yes
28	Asset Inventory	Yes	Yes	Yes
29	Real-Time Process Explorer	Yes	Yes	Yes
30	PerfStack Real-Time Polling	No	Yes	Yes
31	Web-based SSH Client	Partial*	Partial*	Partial*
32	Network Interface Monitoring - SAM	Yes	Yes	No
33	Network Interface Monitoring - NPM	No	No	Yes
34	Real-Time Service Manager	Yes	Yes	Yes
35	Real-Time Event Log Viewer	Yes	Yes	Yes
36	Reboot	Yes	Yes	No
37	Routing	No	No	Yes
38	Topology	No	No	Yes
39	Linux Load Average	No	No	No
40	Volume Name	Yes	Yes	Yes
41	Volume Status	Yes	Yes	Yes
42	Volume Type	Yes	Yes	Yes
43	Volume Size	Yes	Yes	Yes
44	Volume Space Used	Yes	Yes	Yes
45	Volume Space Available	Yes	Yes	Yes
46	Volume Percent Used	Yes	Yes	Yes
47	Volume Allocation Failures	No	No	Yes
48	Volume Avg. Disk sec/Transfer (Latency)	Yes	Yes	No
49	Volume Disk queue length	Yes	Yes	No
50	Volume Read I/O	Yes	Yes	No
51	Volume Write I/O	Yes	Yes	No
52	Volume Total IOPS	Yes	Yes	No
53	AppInsight for IIS	Yes	Yes	No
54	AppInsight for Exchange	Yes	Yes	No
55	AppInsight for SQL	Yes	Yes	Yes
56	DHCP User Experience Monitor	No	Yes	Yes
57	Directory Size Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
58	DNS Monitor - TCP	Yes	Yes	Yes
59	DNS Monitor - UDP	Yes	Yes	Yes
60	DNS User Experience Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
61	Download Speed Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
62	Exchange Web Services UX Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
63	File Age Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
64	File Change Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
65	File Count Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
66	File Existence Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
67	File Size Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
68	FTP Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
69	FTP User Experience Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
70	HTTP Form Login Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
71	HTTP Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
72	HTTPS Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
73	IMAP4 Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
74	IMAP4 User Experience Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
75	JMX Monitor	No	Yes	Yes
76	LDAP User Experience Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
77	Linux/Unix Script Monitor	N/A	N/A	N/A
78	MAPI User Experience Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
79	Nagios Script Monitor	No	No	No
80	NNTP Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
81	ODBC User Experience Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
82	Oracle User Experience Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
83	Performance Counter Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
84	POP3 Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
85	POP3 User Experience Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
86	Process Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
87	Process Monitor - Windows	Yes	Yes	Yes
88	RADIUS User Experience Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
89	Service Status - SNMP	No	No	Yes
90	SMTP Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
91	SNMP Monitor	No	No	Yes
92	SOAP Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
93	SQL Server User Experience Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
94	SSL Certificate Expiration Date Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
95	TACACS+ User Experience Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
96	TCP Port Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
97	Tomcat Server Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
98	VMware Performance Counter Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
99	Web Link Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
100	Windows Event Log Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
101	Windows PowerShell Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
102	Windows Script Monitor	Yes	Partial*	Partial*
103	Windows Service Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
104	WMI Monitor	Yes	Yes	Yes
105	Application Dependencies (with SAM 6.0 and later)	Yes	No	No
106	Push Deployment - Add Node	Yes	N/A	N/A
107	Mass Deployment - Push from Web	Yes	N/A	N/A
108	Manual Installation	Yes	N/A	N/A
109	Pull Deployment - wget/curl/etc.	No	N/A	N/A
110	Mass Deployment - GPO/MSI	Yes	N/A	N/A
111	Mass Deployment - Puppet/Chef	No	N/A	N/A
112	Deployment via Repository	No	N/A	N/A

Cell	Detail
31: Agent	"Partial" assumes the Orion Server or Additional Polling Engine (APE) the node is associated with has routable connectivity to the agent-managed node and that the Windows node is running an SSH Daemon, such as freeSSHd. The Web Based SSH Client communicates over TCP Port 22 from the Orion Server or APE to the selected node and does not utilize the agent communications channel. The Windows Operating System also does not include a native out-of-the-box SSH Server. Windows however, does provide an unencrypted Telnet service for similar functionality. Unfortunately, Orion's Web Based SSH client does not support Telnet at this time.
31: WMI, SNMP	"Partial" assumes the Windows node is running an SSH Daemon, such as freeSSHd. The Windows Operating System does not include a native out-of-the-box SSH Server. Windows however, does provide an unencrypted Telnet service for similar functionality. Unfortunately, Orion's Web Based SSH client does not support Telnet at this time.
102: WMI, SNMP	Windows Script Monitors run against SNMP or WMI managed nodes and execute locally on the Orion Server or Additional Poller through which the node is managed. These Windows Scripts do not execute on the managed node itself. To execute Windows Scripts on the node being managed, users must install the Orion Agent or rewrite their script in PowerShell utilizing WinRM.

saw10

Thank You this is perfect information. Why can I never find this stuff?

saw10

Thanks You for your help in understanding this better.