Orion Feature Request - ESX3.5i monitoring and more

Question

I would like to hear a Solarwinds answer to why Orion doesnt support monitoring of CIM. Its an open standards based monitoring protocol supported by multiple systems including VMWare and will continue growing. Will Orion only continue monitoring based off SNMP only or do your developers already have any plans to build in CIM support. Please submit this as a feature request. Also why doesn't Orion support heartbeat alerts? It's great that we get alerts when something is down or a configured threshold is met for something like CPU or bandwidth, but if the Orion server is down and we don't have something monitoring it, we could have our entire network down and not know..... A heartbeat alert would be great. Currently we do this with a third party product installed on our Orion server, having it built into Orion would be nice.

elwappo · Answer

Thanks for the reply!  I understand where you are coming from.  All I can offer to you from a customer standpoint, which we are a customer, is that we alone have seen our datacenter go from around 5 percent virtualized to 50 percent virtualized in the inside of 12 months.  I don't know if this is the industry norm but I would be willing to suppose that this is occuring at many data center's across the country.  We also have APM and didn't realize that we could be using this as a way to help pull data into solarwinds regarding the usage of the ESXi 3i servers.  We are going to be looking at that today and I will be following up with the boards here to help others that may be looking to do the same thing that we are trying to do.  (Trend our ESX 3i server utilization from a top down perspective.)  As far as CIM goes I would think that would be low hanging fruit for the SolarWinds team.  That aside from a customer standpoint I can offer to you that we want to be able to chart Usage trends from the top level of a VMware ESX 3i host and not per virtual machine.  The information per virtual machine is nice but in the end we have found it's more relevant to see what the hardware host is doing with it's resources.

We will look into the Hot Standby Server.  Thanks for the info there.  We use SolarWinds and rely on it everyday to keep us in the know of what is occuring in and around our network.  And it does a great job.  We are just hitting a wall with how to integrate this fast growing virtual envrionment into the system.  Maybe even a little frustrated.  But talking with you all on the forums helps a great deal.  Thanks again!

FormerMember · Answer

It's always hard to answer questions of the "Why don't you do X?" variety.  The question seems to imply that we considered the issue--CIM in this case--and concluded that we shouldn't do it.  In some cases, that's true:  e.g., Q:  why don't you build a ticketing system?  A:  We don't want to be in that business at this time.

Q:  Why don't you support CIM?

A:  We do, at least in some cases.  APM supports WMI, which is Microsoft's implementation of CIM.  What about VMware?  We don't support VI, which is their implementation of CIM.  Unlike the help desk answer, we haven't made a decision against supporting VI.  We simply haven't done it yet.  We may in the future.  We may not.  We are committed to improving our support of VMware, and you'll see something on that front soon, but the specific technology we use is a secondary issue.  We look at customer problems and try to solve them as well and efficiently as we can.  SolarWinds product teams are very focused on customer problems, not technology.  That's why you won't see us rewrite Orion from scratch using Ruby on Rails or some such.  That would, no doubt, be fun for us, but it's hard to see what it does for the customer base.  All that is to say that we'll support VI when we need it to deliver key features to customers.  And supporting ESXi is something that I think we'll want to do in the future, so I expect us to get there, but that's feature will have to compete with all the other features that get requested  (and there half a dozen requested on this board every day).

Bottom line:  I agree that it would be nice to support VI.  We'll probably do it at some point.

As for heartbeat alerts, we have the Hot Standby Server that's designed to fill that role.