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Feature Suggestion - Monitoring the Monitor

Donald_Francis

So I have written feature requests asking for things like being able to report a non working poller and such, but after a few failures with some services and pollers I really think the program needs some way to monitor itself. Sure there are things you can watch with APM down services and such. But in my cases I have services that run but do not work.

I am not sure how this can be done I would imagine with all the stats in the DB it could be based off of that, pollers not updating, jobs not being completed but I think we really need a canned health monitor set for Orion itself.

There are just to many holes right now in the system, I basically have to monitor manually daily at this point.

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Questionario

yup!

definately agree...

I spend a lot of time just monitoring the monitor server to check if its still healthy...

would be nice to have that automated or improved in some way that I will at least be alarmed!

byrona

Definitely going to have to agree with this.

I just had my poller stop running for two days, when these things happen there is never any indicators unless you are digging around looking at next poll times or database table update times.

MarieB

Great guys--thanks for the feedback. I've marked this for the PM.

ecklerwr1

You could try something like this:

Remotetly Monitor Orion and SQL

Run these vbscripts on another server to monitor the Orion Server and SQL database:

OrionMonitorUpDown.vbs
This VBS script monitors the ORION server on 3 fronts
PING (Is the server there)
WMI (Can I connect)
Service(s) Status (Are the Orion Services Running)

OrionSQLInstanceUpDown.vbs
This VBS script monitors the ORION SQL server on 4 fronts
PING (Is the server there)
WMI (Can I connect)
Service(s) Status (Is the SQL Service Running)
SQL Query (Can I connect and pull a value)

Donald_Francis

Sure, I could also use a clunky free product or a second NPM install but I do not think I should have too.

ecklerwr1

Don't get me wrong... I was just sayin' :}

byrona

Sure, I could also use a clunky free product or a second NPM install but I do not think I should have too.

I am going to agree with Donald on this one. While I think the "duct tape a bailing wire" options are great in IT to keep things running, I don't like to run my business with them; they are difficult to manage at best and don't scale well.

This type of feature doesn't seem difficult to me, it seems a few simple fail-safes could be put into place. For example if the system sees a bunch of "Next Poll Time" fields having times that are in the past, this should raise at least a yellow flag if not a red flag.

Just my $0.02

ecklerwr1

One point is for sure... it's going to have to run on a different server than your NPM instance's machine.

EDIT:

I suppose if you have multiple pollers then they could monitor and report on each other.

neilmborilla

I am not sure how this can be done I would imagine with all the stats in the DB it could be based off of that, pollers not updating, jobs not being completed but I think we really need a canned health monitor set for Orion itself.
There are just to many holes right now in the system, I basically have to monitor manually daily at this point.

I strongly agree with this one.........things like

1. Is the poller is doing its job completely, or missing some of the nodes...

2. JobEngine.sdf reaches maximum size (APM stop polling, or unable to add )

3. If the daily DB maintenance completed.....

4. Services that stopped responding or utilizing resources(CPU and Memory) beyond expected

5. Alerts not being sent accordingly

6. others

Or something like what the "diagnostics" collects everytime you run it

Questionario

yea... and of course be able to alert on it!

But I have been saying that ever since I installed the trial version... For me its definately the most important issue right now!

justty

I requested this feature almost a year ago, I talked with a SolarWinds Rep about it, and got that it is on a feature list, but not enough demand for it. Was told to get another monitor, or implement multiple pollers. This was not an option for us, so I created the free VBS script that was listed above.

We are a small shop, so the idea to spend MORE $$$ for Orion was an obvious NO and implementing another monitor was a NO, but building a simple script was acceptable and has worked for us.

Here is a link to the Feature Request:

JasonKV

Lets drum up more support for this. A monitor for the monitor is REALLY needed.

+1 for my Vote.

kweise

I'd have to agree, there should be some easily discernible way for one to know a polling engine is having an issue.

bshopp

So what all are you looking for here? What are your primary concerns? Are you looking for a more robust HA/DR solution than our existing Hot Standby Engine?

byrona

So what all are you looking for here? What are your primary concerns? Are you looking for a more robust HA/DR solution than our existing Hot Standby Engine?

Brandon

While I can't speak for everybody, I can speak for myself...

Something more robust than the current Hot Standby Engine would be nice. We have the Hot Standby Engine and it doesn't support any of my APM stuff which we are using very heavily.

However, more important than that is the systems ability to detect when it has stopped functioning properly. I have had a good deal of failures where the system was unaware that it wasn't polling things properly (both NPM and APM), it has a habit of dying silently.

I need the system to...

A) Detect when it has failed

Do something about it; fail-over and/or notification

Having the self diagnostics & notification on a separate system is beneficial because if the system has failed, the failure may impair it's ability to detect it's own failure. In this case building more of this functionality into a Hot Standby Engine would be a good idea.

JasonKV

COMPLETE Do-over of the current Hot-Standby. The current system is almost USELESS. Although it picks up polling NPM it does not pick up APM or VoIP. Couple that with its nearly unsupported and you have an issue.

I would like to see a copmlete health view of Orion from the web including polling stats, memory stats, process stats, network stats, database stats. It should be a one stop shop for "feeling" the health of the Orion System.

Make it happen.