Community
- Command Central
- MVP Program
- Monthly Mission
- Blogs
- Groups
- Events
- Media Vault
Products
- Observability
- Network Management
- Application Management
- IT Security
- IT Service Management
- System Management
- Database Management
Content Exchange
- SolarWinds Platform
- Server & Application Monitor
- Database Performance Analyzer
- Server Configuration Monitor
- Network Performance Monitor
- Network Configuration Manager
- SQL Sentry
- Web Help Desk
Free Tools & Trials

Greeting!

Hello All!

I'm new here on the forums, new here at my job, and more importantly, new to solarwinds. So with that in mind, I have a few questions.

I'm a sys admin. One of my tasks here at work is to deploy SW on the systems side of my company. We have a network admin who's already implemented SW for the network. I don't have a history of working with monitoring tools, it just never was part of my day to day responsibilities, or we just never had a need for it. Now, on to the questions:

1. Can anyone point me to some resources with examples of how others have used SW? I'm looking for some high level insight into what can be done with SW from a systems aspect. It seems like most of the info online all pertains to the networking side.

2. Can anyone give me some advice on how to approach this? I'll be honest, I’m a bit intimidated.. The possibilities seem endless and I’m having some issues with what direction to take. I'm sure others here have been in the same boat.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated!

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

netlogix

Here is what I would do.

1) install/configure SNMP for all the systems (servers? Windows? Linux?) you want to monitor

2) if possible, obtain a list of IPs for the servers (DNS export?) and use SW discovery to import the nodes, but only get the top cpu and mem, the volumes and the non-loop back NICs. (if you have Server 2008+, you may get extra NICs that you have to sort through).

3) get used looking at the top 10 lists, seeing what is gathered.

4) setup alerts for high sustained CPU usage, exclude some nodes that have it and is normal, move to RAM, NIC usage, volume space remaining, etc. Wait till you are comfortable with that (maybe a month with just NPM features).

5) Consider getting APM and a list of applications that are important to your business, then map those applications to processes running on servers, network ports that are available, words on a web page, etc. and use APM to monitor them.

The important thing is to take it in steps, like you said, there is a lot you can do, don't try to do all of it at once. Make reasonable goals and it should start getting easier as you go.

Check out SW's demo site

All comments

netlogix

Here is what I would do.

1) install/configure SNMP for all the systems (servers? Windows? Linux?) you want to monitor

3) get used looking at the top 10 lists, seeing what is gathered.

The important thing is to take it in steps, like you said, there is a lot you can do, don't try to do all of it at once. Make reasonable goals and it should start getting easier as you go.

Check out SW's demo site

FormerMember

Welcome to the fold, sumfknguy!

Orion can be intimiadting but once you get an idea of what it can do and what you need to accomplish it is pretty cool. As mentioned you need to collect some basic information, turn on SNMP and then start playing.

Throw out questions as you go, no matter how simple and someone will respond - usually.

Let us help you....

sumfknguy

Thanks!! Appreciate the welcome!

MarieB

Hi Sumfknguy--

For further support, check out the Support page on thwack. It contains many Orion NPM tutorials as well as a complete list of documentation for most of Solarwind's product line.