This poll corresponds with question number 1 for the May 2021 Monthly Mission - if the question hasn't become available to you, yet, please wait to answer in order to get your points.
No challenge - I use Orion ;-)
While not as bad as when I first started at my present company were the silo's. Nobody wanted you to watch their stuff because they were afraid to air their dirty laundry so to speak. That has evolved to being sure you have the right mix of tools..granted you still have other teams trying to tell you that certain tools no longer have a place or should have been taken out years ago.
Going with the "too many tools" answer, I would expand on that to say that even having just 2 or 3 tools creates challenges. They can include finding ways to normalize and collate the data, consolidating alert management, and also dealing with differing priorities (or even politics) when different teams own different tools.
Not at my present job but previously had - I would coin the term 'Manageer' - a manager that like to do engineering work and wasn't very good at it.
Learning to use the tool that's in place to monitor that environment. That was two and a half years ago when I became an Application Administrator and first touched SolarWinds Orion. Now I feel like I am well versed in the tool and need to work on ancillary skills to be able to interface with the database and use SWQL and other deeper-rooted tech to help with my duties. I need more Monthly Missions to earn enough points for the SCP!
The biggest challenge that I have is getting the end user to define the actual monitoring requirement. Orion takes care of the rest.
I went with other, the biggest issue is that there is only one me, and 450 other IS staff to update everything else. Its hard to keep up with all of it.
Teams as Well as leaderships willingness to allow the application to do what it does best monitor!
There is not a "too many tools" problem for me, but there are proprietary tools that do one or two specific things and not much else. The separation of tools is important, I believe. Having everything under one umbrella can paint yourself into a corner and leave you completely down in the even something goes wrong.
Too many silos. I manage the WAN, no insight into the servers or the databases. Leads to lots of finger-pointing, but doesn't look to change any time soon.
It's part too many tools but largely it's people/teams resistance to change or unwillingness to give up control.
I've discovered people hide different tools because they want to keep control of their environment, they don't want other people seeing what they have and/or it somehow validates their team. I've had one team flat out refuse to share information out because that meant they would have to follow standards and/or best practices. The didn't want to have someone else's standard dictate how they where going to operate, no matter what.
Our issues is that we have a fairly large IT Team (500+) with Team Silos that all use different tools. So, only the network team using Solarwinds just to monitor network team devices. Server Team has their tools, SQL Team has their tools, etc
same here
Too many chefs in the kitchen spoil the broth. Leadership just wants everything monitored without "Observability Objectives". This creates disparity between device roles or functional management groups (I think this is what others are calling "too many silos"). Sharing the observability presentation possibilities, the options can be overwhelming. View management then becomes a full time effort (at least in our shop).
The most common challenge I see in working with customers to deploy Orion is in bringing all the stakeholders together on a common journey. Whether an active stakeholder on the function of monitoring or a 'customer' of monitoring where their app, device, infrastructure is included in monitoring. Getting everyone on the same page and a consistent installation can be the challenge - people & politics
Getting the service owner to handover what needs to be monitored and allow access.
Bureaucracy. Someday would like the bureacrats to allow us to re-install Solarwinds Orion products.
My problem, there is only 1 of me! Thanks to Orion, all the big lifting is done, I just need to keep on top of any changes, and most important of all, take most of the recommendations being provided by Solarwinds. I am fortunate that my organization is small, but it is still a major chore to stay on top of everything. I LOVE MY SOLARWINDS!
Making the others in my work place are doing things the same way and not each doing things their own way.
Other - self service, company is too big for my team of 3 to service the requests of everyone, learn their tools and explain to them how they should be monitoring their stuff. So we try to make it so those who are able can DIY what they need to free up bandwidth for the ones who need more hand holding. The hard part there, and this isn't specifically just Orion, is getting the RBAC granular enough to do what we need without giving away the keys to everything.
Orion is great but the lack of some features is a challenge, sometimes we're looking for a monitoring feature that for some reason is not offered by Orion and we're forced to buy another tool from other vendors for that need. A lot of good features should've been included but instead, remain as feature requests. Wireless monitoring leaves a lot to be desired, another one is just recently with the expensive Log Analyzer, there are no built-in widgets to use like there were with the legacy version and filtering of the log results, in general, is rather limited, you can't even use custom properties and considering the price, it's not a good deal.
I agree with you on many fronts. I often say Solarwinds is the best swis-army knife out there. However it's horrible screwdriver, wrench, knife, etc... Which results in buying other applications that fit those roles, which then leads to having multiple software suites pretty much doing the same thing except for the one thing that they do best.
The question then becomes can we get by using the Solarwinds swis-army knife screwdriver or do we need to purchase a Craftsman screwdriver set???
<Man I love being able to mix tech talk with garage talk and making it work>
However, I am curious on what you mean by saying you can't even use custom properties??? What is it that your trying to do with them? We rely heavily on custom properties above and beyond, I'm sure> what Solarwinds intended it to be. Frankly you're scaring me on upgrading if we'll loose functionality of custom properties.
The custom properties are good, no worries there.
I was referring to filtering log messages based on custom properties using the new LogViewer/Log Analyzer that replaced the legacy syslog and that's not possible, at least not at this point. It's currently limited to Level, Tags, Node name, IP address, Machine type, and Vendor only
cool, thanks! I can feel my blood pressure dropping already.
Security! Missing firewall rules and antivirus/antimalware software are my biggest bugbear, especially when working in an environment where monitoring was not considered as part of the design.
Other, political/silo'd/people not getting back/not knowing who the right people are/etc
