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Orion, any good? Your views would be welcome.

Hi,

We are currently looking at Orion to help us manage our network. We are a medium sized business supporting predominately retail stores and data centre space distributed all over the UK. We have no similar toolsets in place.

What I would like to know after reading all the great but obvioulsy one sided marketing speil, what do you lot think about the product?

Would you buy it again?

Also is there any advice you would offer to someone looking at purchasing the Orion toolset?

Your views would be appreciated

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Network_Guru

If you don't have anything right now, then you are missing a lot!
I highly recommend it for ease of deployment & instant results.
Even a 12 year old could setup monitoring on a 1000 node network in a couple of hours, it's that simple!

For an "un-biased" opinion, I did a search in this forum for "feedback" & "demo" and here are some results:

www2.solarwinds.net/.../topic.asp
www2.solarwinds.net/.../topic.asp
www2.solarwinds.net/.../topic.asp

All I can suggest is to download the demo & try it out yourself.

-=Cheers=-
NG

BwlBoy

Guys

Sorry if the question is too broad. What I would like is the views of the people who use the tool not the solarwinds marketing people.

The rest of the forum is very specific to certain issues or functionality. What I am after is did it do the job you bought it for and any advice on do's and don't when setting it up.

Orion novice.

BwlBoy

Thank you guru!

skaczkowski

BwlBoy,

Having downloaded the run the demo for 30 days I can tell you that Orion is definitely a good way go, here's a rundown of things from my experience with Orion vs Openview.

Our network consists of about 1000 nodes, routers, switches, all different speeds and media,etc, overall a pretty diverse network.

We currently use Openview for (sorta) monitoring everything which we've been using for quite a while, mainly because it's what has always been there, not because it's good or easy to run.

With Openview I've spent countless hours dragging icons around, creating connections, basically trying to create 'Pretty' Maps, which is about all you get out of it, there isn't much behind the colored icons unless you spend A LOT of time and resources on it.

With Orion I was able to get it up and going, managing about 100 nodes with useful notifications, thresholds all with about a weeks worth of work! All the time I spent with Openview (MONTHS worth!) I didn't come close to the functionality I was able to achieve with Orion in that short amount of time.

Orion doesn't have an automatic discovery, you have to run an app to discovers nodes, then import them. At first I though this might be a problem, but coming from Openview I actually like it better because it gives you more control over what's being discovered. If you're using auto discovery with Openview it's a real pain in the butt to STOP it from discovering things, have fun editing those text files!

The customizable Web interface of Orion is great. You're able to tweak and really set things up the way you like if you choose to. If you really want to go nuts feel free to edit the web pages themselves, it's all very open for you to mess with. Everyone can have their own view if you like or you can make it a one size fits all thing. It's great having a simple list of devices that you manage instead of having some huge nightmare of a map with a bazillion lines all over the place to dig through.

Setting up alerting and notifications is a snap, Orion has about 12 canned ways to notify you that something happened. Just pick the device(s), set the parameters then the notification and you're done! You can even setup multiple notifications on different schedules for each alert! All with the click of the mouse!

The reporting is quite nice too, not only do they give you a number of canned reports, but they also supply you with a tool that lets you edit them or create your own from scratch. In about an hours worth of playing around I was able to create a couple reports that showed availability for devices on our WAN and Wireless Access Points. You can also download a tool (free of charge) that lets you schedule the delivery any report, good luck doing that with Openview without spending another $50k on an addon. One problem I have with the reporting tool is that it's somewhat of a hack and basically emails the web page of the report, it doesn't generate anything directly from the database. The other issue with reporting is that you can't include any graphs to visually show things, it's all numbers and you know as well as I do that managers LOVE graphics!

I've also looked at numerous other products out there like What's up, IpMonitor, Open source and the really pricey ones and they just don't have the functionality or simplicity or they're TOO simple or TOO functional then when compared to Orion..

We haven't purchased it yet (damn politics!) but everyone in my group agrees that it's a really good product for the price so hopefully soon we'll be the owner of a nice new SLX version of Orion..

Hope this helps..

Cheers!

-Steve

skaczkowski

Oh!

I forgot to mention a couple of things..

First off we're also looking at dumping Concord in favor of Orion so you're really getting 2 great products for a FRACTION of the cost of one.

Just to give you an idea, HP wants to stick us for ~$25K just to upgrade our current version of Openview NMS to the latest and greatest(?), Orion costs $15k brand new UNLIMITED license.

We've spent ohhhhhhh... A LOT on Concord, I think our anual maintenance (software MAINTENANCE, we ALREADY own the damned thing) runs us around ~$30K if I'm not mistaken.

So for $40K LESS we get a product that's about 10 times easier to setup and 50 times as functional as 2 products put together, seems like a no brainer for me..

The other awesome feature that I forgot to mention that we really love about Orion is the integrated Syslog server!

With the Syslog server you can setup your devices (servers, routers, switches,etc) to send their messages to Orion (all on different facilities to keep things straight) and act on those messages. You can use syslog instead of SNMP traps, in fact you get more info out of Cisco devices via syslog than traps anyway so why not it instead.

So, for instance you setup a switch to syslog to Orion what you can do is setup an alert that searches for a power supply failure and if it sees one to notify you on that. It's very flexible and even allows for regular expressions so it's very powerful. The other cool thing is that you're able to view say like the last 25 syslog events on your main summary view. It's great to one one place to look at a complete status of your network..

Ok, now that is all for now..

-Steve

BwlBoy

Cheers skaczkowski that's exactly what I was after. Owe you one. You were right manager's love graphs.

BryanBecker

We dumped Concord for Orion as well....we couldn't justify the maintenance costs when Orion did a better job at a fraction of the costs.

BB

wgrif

I have been testing Orion for the past 2 weeks and I love it. It has alerted us to some major issues BEFORE anyone else even knew there was a problem and we were able to get them fixed before the calls started coming in. Even though I haven't had the time to dive into it full time this program is so easy to get up and running, "even during my hectic schedule". Setting up different webpages for different departments is awesome. These people do not need more information than they can handle. It also makes YOU look good.

clerum

Overall I would say I'm pleased with the product. We were using it for basic statisitical tracking on our core, and now have migrated over our enitre Openview platform.

What we are really lacking is custom MIB and snmp trap support. This as promised for Q105 with network service monitoring coming slightly before. We were informed of this at time of purchase in Q304. I have not seen strong movement or an offical mention of this recently, but hopefully that is a good sign that they are close.

So I wouldn't expect any timelines you have been given to hold up. That said it is a great product that is being activly developed.

marcoslongo

Today I installed Orion and our CEO was around. Someone else is toying with other tools, spending a lot of time, while I was up in little time with a discovered baseline. I gave him web access and later he watched a network fault in real time from home. By coincidence SolarWinds sales had just sent me the unlimited version, that installed easily over the previous 100-nodes. I think the CEO is impressed but clearly there is room for improvement in the product. Still I like it much.

DonYonce

marcoslongo,
Please send your ideas for improvement to Development@SolarWinds.Net
Thanks !

BwlBoy

Cheers for the response. Anyone got experience of the product in a Managed Service environment eg. multiple customer networks.

If so how did you set this up to ensure the security of these networks by letting Orion through to everything?

jkeberle

We use orion if part of our managed service package. The trick to securing each customer from others is all in external setups. SSL to heighten the overall security of the platform which Orion runs on and a few other tweaks... all in all its working out well.

Troy8181

BwlBoy,

We are a Managed Services Provider for 60 clients across the country (2500 nodes) and use this tool for all our monitoring, real time alerts, historical reporting, real-time troubleshooting, etc. This is an excellent product and well worth the money for us. We used to use What's Up Professional, but this program is extremely more expandable and stable. The reporting features alone save me tons of time in just being able to show people one time how easy it is for them to pull their own reports. It took me about a day to set up 5 reports for all 60 clients, then I made them viewable on the main page and wiped my hands of reporting. Overall, everything is very straightforward and easy to work with. Just make sure you have a good SQL backup plan.

Hope this helps.

Troy8181

To set up monitoring, we set up SNMP on each server to allow Read-Only access to the IP of the Solarwinds server. When you add the node to Solarwinds, you just enter the SNMP string and it finds everything for you automatically. You can just pick and choose what you want to monitor. It really couldn't be much more simple.

The only thing we would like to see from the product is the ability to monitor physical hard drive status. It monitors volumes but not the physical drive. I believe they may be working on it for a future release.

marcoslongo

quote:Originally posted by Don Yonce

marcoslongo,
Please send your ideas for improvement to Development@SolarWinds.Net
Thanks !

Why not mentiont possible improvements here and see what other people thinks?

I have few random ones:

- easier grouping of nodes (multiple select, etc) in map maker
- netflow collector
- custom OIDs attachable directly to node
- custom OIDs thresholds watch in alarms
- adsl headend support. that is, where I have 100's of interfaces, displaying a round for each customer won't work, would need another kind of graphic to visualize overall status. haven't seen the cable modem management product, but like thet concept is the same.
- XML import of nodes in database, so I can link it to provisioning

Thanks!

fbailey

We have been running this product for a couple of years now, we found it by mistake. It is without a doubt one of the best 6k investments we have made.

Many times we get people blaming our network for "running slow", and being "down". We monitor all our key devices, with uplink ports, and where necessary all ports. and we can always prove that everything is running tickety boo. And when something goes wrong we can find it quickly, as Orion lets us know. We have also invested in the Engineers Toolsets, and we are currently trying to secure funding for Cirrus, which so far on evaluation has saved us 4 to 5 days worth of work.

I would happily say Orion does the job we bought it for, which is overall network monitoring, and the ability to print out a graph.
Which is guaranteed to impress managers. Even more so when they come in pretty colours.

Hope this helps.

BTW, The other thing, that we have not used ourselves but have benefited from, is users of the forum making suggestions, and them appearing in the later next version.

f5b

DannyMc

quote:Originally posted by BwlBoy

Sorry if the question is too broad. What I would like is the views of the people who use the tool not the solarwinds marketing people.
The rest of the forum is very specific to certain issues or functionality. What I am after is did it do the job you bought it for and any advice on do's and don't when setting it up.

The first place to start will be to determine what you are looking for. Everyone needs are different. I try to work with the 80/20 rule. If it will not do 80% of what you need, then forget it.

I used to use HP OpenView and Cisco Work 2000. Kicked both of them to the curb in favor of Orion. I had Orion up, running, collecting information and presenting it via web interface in one afternoon for 100 devices! I got further in that 1/2 day than what I did in 3 years of OpenView and CiscoWorks. I originally started off with Engineer's Edition and after 2 years moved to Orion. I am now in the process of moving Orion to a full blown version of SQL Server. Doing that today.

As Network Guru mentioned, do a search on the forums. You are not the first person to ask this question nor get a response.

They are working on Custom MIBs. This will be a HUGE improvement to the product and give existing customers a lot of flexability!

As for the NetFlow, with all the open source and commercial products that are out there, I'm not sure if it would be advantageous for SolarWinds to come out with their own product. Then again, they could always partner with one or two NetFlow vendors and write hooks into Orion so it plays will with another vendor's product.

Just read a thread a minute ago where Plixer has hooks into Orion for their NetFlow product. Their product seems inexpensive and intuitive which I believe are the main reasons why many of us dropped other products such as Concord, OpenView and CiscoWorks.

DannyMc

quote:Originally posted by fbailey

Cirrus, which so far on evaluation has saved us 4 to 5 days worth of work.

Please elaborate. I have KiwiCat Tools ($250) but looked at Cirrus and deemed it too expensive for what it does.

Thanks,
Danny Mc?

DannyMc

quote:Originally posted by skaczkowski

We've spent ohhhhhhh... A LOT on Concord, I think our anual maintenance (software MAINTENANCE, we ALREADY own the damned thing) runs us around ~$30K if I'm not mistaken.
With the Syslog server you can setup your devices (servers, routers, switches,etc) to send their messages to Orion (all on different facilities to keep things straight) and act on those messages. You can use syslog instead of SNMP traps, in fact you get more info out of Cisco devices via syslog than traps anyway so why not it instead.

Maintenace for the unlimited node is around $2k/year versus your $30k.

Be careful with Syslog! I turned this on for a couple of my devices that I should not have and filled up the SQL database (2g limit). Lost several days of data. I'm upgrading to full version of SQL Server 2000 today. Then I can turn my Pix logging back on. I use Kiwi Syslog as well but Kiwi text files are not as easy to search as the Solarwinds Syslog.

jneiberger

We're currently evaluating a number of network monitoring products and Orion continues to maintain our interest. It isn't as functional as some of the others we're looking at, but it is far simpler to implement, configure, and maintain. It's missing just a couple of things that would make it a no-brainer for me:

1. Custom MIB monitoring
2. Port Monitoring

Those two things would dramatically increase the value of the product. Then,

3. SNMP Traps

If Orion could receive and act on SNMP traps, I could completely get rid of Network Node Manager.

4. NetFlow integration
5. Cisco SAA (IP SLA) integration

If Orion had out-of-the-box Netflow capabilities, I'd dance a jig! The SLX version of Orion costs $15,000. If you were to add all of the above capabilities, I could easily see us being willing to spend $25K - $30K on it.

It is also missing the ability to do SLA reporting. It would be extremely handy if we could create service level objectives out of some of the Orion monitors and then combine the SLOs into an SLA that could be monitored and reported on separately. One of the other products I'm looking at can do this but it's very expensive and extremely difficult to configure.

With all that being said, it appears that Orion is one of the better options on the market depending on your goals and requirements.

Oh, I almost forgot. One other *huge* negative about Orion is that it is only partially web-based and requires far too much interaction at the console. The other major players in the market have gotten away from this and don't require console access. Why any software developer would continue to develop applications that require console access to Windows servers is beyond me, but Orion must be configured and maintained via the console. As I understand it, all of the admin interfaces require console access and only the end-user interface is web-based.

I would be fine with having to run a separate client application on my own PC that would interact with the server, but the level of console interaction required detracts from a great product.

jneiberger

I also forgot about dependencies. Orion *really* needs a scalable method of determining device dependencies and only alerting on the root cause. I know that Orion offers alert depencies right now, but it's my understanding that it is all manually configured and I've read elsewhere in the forums that it doesn't scale well.

Don't get me wrong, I really like what I've seen of Orion! I just think it is missing a few very important things. And based on the number of requests on these forums for the same features, I'm not the only one who thinks these features need to be added sooner rather than later.

Mithrilhall

jneiberger, I'm not sure what you mean by Port Monitoring but you could write your own custom page.

We are constantly turning ports on/off on our switches and I need the ability to do this from a webpage. The only way to do it with Orion is if you purchase the Toolset and use it to turn the ports on and off. This of course still does not save the configuration.

Instead of purchasing the Toolset for one feature I wrote a custom page in PHP that turns ports on/off via SNMP. I've also coded in the fuctionality to save the running config to the startup config.

jneiberger

I was referring to TCP port monitoring.

edwardle

jneibeger,

With regard to picking up SNMP traps, there are free SNMP trap receivers available. Upon receiving an SNMP trap, you should be able to use a free syslog generator such as klog.exe (available from Kiwi Enterprises www.kiwisyslog.com) to send the message as a syslog into Orion.

jneiberger

quote:Originally posted by skaczkowski

We've spent ohhhhhhh... A LOT on Concord, I think our anual maintenance (software MAINTENANCE, we ALREADY own the damned thing) runs us around ~$30K if I'm not mistaken.

So for $40K LESS we get a product that's about 10 times easier to setup and 50 times as functional as 2 products put together, seems like a no brainer for me..

Steve, I'm curious about what you really mean by these comments. In my research of Orion and Concord, it looks like Concord's reporting is far more comprehensive, it can do port monitoring and application-level monitoring, it has SLA reports, it can integrate data other traffic monitoring tools (NBAR, RMON, NetFlow), it has auto discovery, it has service/daemon monitoring, it has inventory reporting, it can configure and integrate with Cisco SAA (IP SLA), it has agent-based server monitoring, it can receive SNMP traps, it can do trending and predictive reports for capacity planning, it can proactively alert you if a trend is approaching a preconfigured threshold, it is purely web-based, it can do custom MIB monitoring, it offers normalization of multivendor MIB variables, it has configurable dependencies, etc.

So, how can you say that Orion is 50 times more functional than NNM and Concord put together?

Granted, Concord is *very* expensive, very complicated, and far more difficult to install, configure, and operate. However, how can you say that Orion provides more functionality than Concord?

I want to make it clear that I think Orion is a great product and I don't want the above comparison to appear like I'm being negative about it. I'm just hoping to get some clarification of that statement that Orion provides more functionality than Concord.

Or, did you mean more immediately usable functionality in a much shorter period of time? It appears that Orion is *far* simpler to install, configure, and maintain. I've heard that you can have it up and running and monitoring a decent size network in just a few hours, and without having to send someone to a week-long training class to understand the product. That's definitely an advantage.

John