Can this be accomplished with agent monitoring now - with relative easy any gotchas or concerns from anyone already testing this or actually doing it ?
Steve
Yes, you can pretty easily monitor Azure VMs using the agent. No real gotchas. We are currently doing this for about a dozen or so VMs in Azure. It's not worth trying to monitor the virtual NIC though, as it gets removed/recreated each time the VM reboots.
can share with out comprising any security on your set up -
My Pollers would be sitting in our managed data center in Ohio - and we are looking at spinning up some servers in US azure and maybe UK azure
I don't think there would be any issue with that. You have a VPN link into Azure from your normal network, right? Or is your Azure environment completely disconnected from your normal network?
Our setup is our central SolarWinds poller back at our main location, then we have several Azure VMs in a US region. I installed the SolarWinds agents on the VMs in server initiated mode, so polling traffic/communication needs to be initiated from our main poller. The agent is pretty good with not using too much bandwidth and handling a VPN connection like that with quite a bit of latency.
thats what i am not sure of yet if it will be VPN connections or not .. just got dumped on me to see if solarwinds would work
I have several systems in Azure now that I am using the agent to monitor. I have the agent configured in "active agent" mode and just sends data back to the Orion server and it works great.
I'm currently setting up an environment in Azure and using SW from our third party datacenter, via VPN tunnel, to monitor my VMs. Have you guys noticed any intermittent connectivity? We are trying to monitor using snmp and/or WMI. I see that most of you are using the Windows agent. Are you all seeing better results with using the agent?
thanks,
Leo
I don't have good comparisons between the agent and SNMP as we choose to go with the agent from the start. What I can say is that for the most part the agent has been very solid and I plan to continue using it more and more.
The agent has worked pretty well for us. We started out with SNMP. I have seen some cases of weird issues with the agent, but nothing show-stopping. And apparently some of the issues causing us grief with the agent are supposedly fixed in SAM 6.3. I would definitely recommend the agent over SNMP/WMI in a hosted environment like Azure. Lower latency, the client does all the work, it keeps recording data if it loses a connection to the poller, end-to-end encryption, etc.
Thanks! The agent sounds like the best approach.
Thanks! I'll move forward with installing agents on all VMs within that environment.
thwack.solarwinds.com/.../how-to-monitor-any-azure-services-using-api-polling
