Orion Agents in the cloud? Yes or No (Azure, Terraform, DSC)

Wondering what others have found to be best for monitoring VMs in cloud services like Azure.

On prem we have been agentless but I like the use of Agents for cloud

Ability to store data if connection is lost
Auto deploy and setup node in Solarwinds
Better bandwidth use
Hopefully fewer port exhaustions or general wmi issues

Are you using agents in the cloud, how are you deploying - push from Solarwinds manually, Desired State Configuration, or GPO?

What happens if the cloud resource (VM) is removed and readded with out removing the Node/Agent from Orion first? Will Orion recognize it as the same node or will there be an orphaned node?

Any experiences good or bad with Orion Agent on VMs in the cloud?

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stevenstadel

We use Orion Agents in the cloud with auto-deployment, the agent is part of the template, and automatically registers and updates (if out of date). It is a great solution that uses limited ports and encryption. One issue we see every so often is a single node requiring a service restart. Easy enough to alert on and restart from the Orion Website. If the VM is deleted and created again it will orphan the node in my experience.

crebel

Stevenstadel - Thanks for your reply

How are your templates created?

Are you using Azure or another Cloud option?

We are trying to control the install via Azure DSC when the VMs are deployed but are running into issues. Also trying to stay away from GPOs if possible. The VMs themselves are deployed via Terraform

stevenstadel

We are using Bicep template to deploy the VMs in Azure.

After the VM is deployed, NICs are setup, and it joins to the domain we use a private blob storage account to copy the agent over and then execute a PowerShell script for the deploy.