Application Monitoring???

Question

I am not a network expert but our company is looking for solutions which can monitor various applications in our IT Landscape such as Weblogic, BMC Patrol, Oracle, Citrix etc to name a few.

Can Orion monitor these applications and what is the depth of the metrics which it can collect (when compared to other monitoring solutions in the market). Is there some way to get hold of the metrics collected in these applications for our engineers?

chris.lapoint · Answer

Hi temba,

Orion and ipMonitor are developed by SolarWinds and are not based on any open source projects like Nagios.   For the applications you listed, Orion AM module can monitor the processes and services that represent those applications and their respective CPU load and memory utilization from a performance perspective.

ipMonitor allows you to generate synthetic transactions to test the responsiveness of the underlying infrastructure components that are required for those applications to be considered up.   For example, SAP requires a database and web server (for remote admin).   ipMonitor can generate SQL queries and HTTP requests to monitor availability and responsiveness of SAP from an end user perspective.

I would recommend checking out the Orion live demo (after logging in, click on Application Monitor tab to see what's available)  and taking the 2-minute Tour for ipMonitor to familiarize yourself more with the products.  If either/both of them seem like they might be what you're looking for, let us know and we can someone from sales follow up with you.

Thanks,

FormerMember · Answer

Orion is not based on Nagios.  It is not open source.  It will not accept Nagio plugins.

Orion is a proprietary solution, but it is customizable, very flexible, and quite affordable.  While a solution like Nagios is nominally free, many of our customers have tried it and found that the overhead of deployment, configuration, and ongoing maintenance for Nagios drives the total cost of ownership way beyond that of Orion.

The value of Orion is that it is very to install, deploy, and configure.  What I'd suggest is that you download Orion and the various modules.  Install all of them and check out their capabilities.  That's the best way to determine whether this solution will satisfy the requirements of your organization.

temba · Answer

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply. As mentioned in my previous pot, our organization wants to monitor various applications in its IT system. This includes but is not limited to SAP, Weblogic, Websphere, Oracle, Peoplesoft, VMware etc.

Some of my colleagues refferred me to the open source solution instead of commercially available IBM Tivoli, HP OVO etc.

At this point of time, I am trying to educate myself on the capabilities of the open source solutions. I presume that this is all based on Nagios.

Do monitoring capabilities of Solarwinds support these applications specially for performace data?

It will be great if you can help me understand that if there are certain plugins not currently supported by Solarwinds then how can be work with them as well? Can Solarwinds support these adaptors as well? Moreover, it will be great if you can point me to some database where all possible monitoring solutions are listed.