New to solarwinds

Hello all.

I'm entirely new to solarwinds, and have recently started in my current job. Previously in my career I've been a heavy user to nagios to do systems monitoring, and am used to rolling my own checks to extend what is a fairly simplistic tool for server monitoring into the realm of application monitoring.

Here (my current role) I've been told to forget about Nagios and use Solarwinds instead - so I'm keen to start learning who to extend what hte platform is currently doing in our situation - which seems to be OS-level monitoring and not much else, and leverage it into the realm of even simple application management. In Nagios using check_mk it was pretty simple to monitor, for instance, the state of specific systemd services, and nearly as easy to roll custom checks to do simple things such as report on the output of 'uptime'.

Having a quick play with the GUI of solarwinds, I have to say that I'm a bit stumped at this stage and overwhelmed with the amount of documentation given this is such a huge product.

Can anyone give me a pointer to some good examples of how to extend linux OS monitoring and the basic approach to take with developing application monitoring beyond the canned out of the box solutions?

Thanks

Dave

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neomatrix1217

First off welcome when you say extend the linux OS monitoring can you give us more specifics on what you want to monitor?

https://www.solarwinds.com/server-application-monitor/use-cases/linux-performance-monitoring

https://support.solarwinds.com/SuccessCenter/s/article/SolarWinds-Orion-2016-2-feature-Orion-Agent-for-Linux?language=en_US

www.solarwinds.com/.../red-hat-enterprise-linux-monitoring

DaveFord

Well. any and everything. For instance, first thing I'm looking to improve our monitoring of is our Puppet installtion. We're currently monitoring the availability of the servers, but that appears to be about it. I'd like to extend this by monitoring the state of the systemd service, checking the output of certain calls to the api and perhaps running a check script on the server locally. Previously my expereinces with check_mk would have allowed me to do that very easily, simply by monitoring the specific named service and by writing scripts to produce a specifically formatted text output that would be detected and monitored by the check_mk agent, and hence by the nagios platform. Trying to understand what the equivalent in the solarwnds platform would be. I can see that the system is already monitoring os system load, cpu usage, memory usage, etc.

The links you sent me are interesting albeit vague. Having trouble finding some clear examples though - was wondering if others here were doing similar with application monitoring on linux platforms with solarwinds and what the general approach is.

Cheers

stevenstadel

One of my general approaches is to watch specific running processes as required by the service owner. You can do this by running a Real-Time Process Explorer on the agent and choosing the process you want to start watching to create an application template or use the SAM Component Monitor Wizard to select multiple processes.

We have also created scripts using Perl to generate custom application monitors. Looking at the Linux Script Templates can be a good start. Linux/Unix Script Monitor (solarwinds.com)

There is also a Nagios Custom Monitor and move your custom scripts over Nagios Script Monitor (solarwinds.com)