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Custom Poller Limitation - Help?

My institution would love to use Solarwinds for it's net monitoring. Right now we're using MRTG but they want something that's supported by a commercial company.

I have found that Solarwinds can't do something very important that MRTG does with no problem. On a Cisco router we are using some QOS classes to seperate traffic and limit each class indepently. We graph the utilization of each class by using MRTG to poll the router for the 64 bit absolute packet counter for each class. MRTG is able to turn this absolute value (which simply increases with time, as traffic passes through the class) into a rate and a graph.

With Orion's custom mib poller feature, the best it can do is collect the ever-increasing counter value at eachpolling interval. It has no provision for calculating the differential value between each polling cycle and turning that result into a rate and a graph.

Since it seems like it has to do this already for graphing 'factory' built-in interfaces on the router, it seems like it shouldn't be hard to extend availability and control for that same functionality into the custom mib poller part of the product, should it?

Any help or insight anyone could share on this would be appreciated. Thanks!

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Dan.Wendeln

When creating the Custom Poller select Rate as the MIB Value Type and the Units and Timeframe for that value. That will conver the counter values into a rate calculated poll by poll.

Cheers,

Dan

netadm1n

I tried this but the numbers and graphs I was getting didn't appear to make sense. I tried adjusting the polling interval for the router to one minute, then set the rate in the custom mib poller to by bytes per minute. Does the polling interval for the node in fact determine what I should set the rate to in creating the custom mib poller for it's OID's if I want the collected data and generated graph to show bytes per second? How does the custom poller take into account any variability on the actual polling interval that is accomplished by Orion? Like, if the router is slow to respond or fails to respond here and there, does the custom poller keep track of this and adjust it's calculations for actual number of packets that passed from one interval to the next?

netadm1n

I'm still looking at this. I have an OID that contains a 64 bit decimal number. The number is a simple counter that increments over time (until it eventually rolls over). It just represents total bytes. It doesn't represent a rate. Are you saying that Orion will in fact do the work to derive a rate from this counter?

I created a custom mib poller for the OID in question and configured it with 'MIB Value Type' set to 'Rate', the word 'bytes' entered in the 'Unit' field and 'Timeframe' set to 'Minute'.

Orion doesn't look like it's calculating a rate. It looks like it's interpreting the counter value as being a rate already and just plotting it on a graph. The graph it draws shows a bunch of climbs toward single, simple peaks. Those are all immediately followed by a drop to zero and then an immediate resumption of a similarly sloped climb toward another similar looking peak. The process is just repeating.

Also, the current value reported by the poller on the node summary page shows something around 80 Gbpm, which I assume should be read as, "80 gigabytes per minute"? When I do the math, that translates into 10 gigabits per second. I only have a few *megabits* per second of traffic being handled by the mechanism the OID is reporting on.

Have I misunderstood what the custom MIB poller feature is capable of or how I'm supposed to set it up to do what I'm asking for? Is a custom MIB poller capable of doing this?

Thanks for any additional help or feedback anyone can give me.

netadm1n

It's been a day or so with no reply to my last post on this. Does that mean my understanding of what the custom MIB poller can/can not be used for is correct? Thanks.