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Orion v8

mjhamilton

Been off the ball for a bit on other projects and now back to Orion at my location..

Currently running v7.8 and loving every minute... having to use WUP from IPSwitch to bridge the custom/service/snmp monitoring gap but am hoping that eventually Orion will do everything...

Anyone got any pointers to what is going to be in v8??.. is there a location we can go to see WIP and ideas?

Don Yonce or a.n.other may want to comment here or at least point me in the direction of some whitepapers....

AOP is up for next year and my European division want ideas and thoughts on where to go as they have nothing at the moment.... so some help with the sales pitch would be nice...

Martin J. Hamilton... lost in a sea of snmp...

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jonchill

Danocoh. while I agree with you over the features and functionality requests that have been banded around for the past few years and need to be put into Orion free of charge, I definately don't agree with your comments on the syslog server I think it was a great addition and works very well particularly with devices we can't have SNMP access for but can have them send syslog messages. You may not of found the syslog feature usable but I'm sure there are many others that have.

Jon

IT Infrastructure Manager
Pilgrim Hospital
UK

Network_Guru

Dancoh,

I don't think you will find another NM product around that will give you anywhere near the same "Bang for the Buck" as you get with Orion.

There's not many NM companies that have forums with posts from customers exchanging ideas & requesting features from the Chairman and Chief Architect of the Company.

'nuff said.....

(If you disagree, then see what others are saying about this product compared to others on the market) www2.solarwinds.net/.../topic.asp

-=Cheers=-
NG

mjhamilton

I agree with the above statement 'bang for buck'.. Orion wins this race hands down...

I am a smallish site with 12x6509's, 30+ Wintel and 10 x Sun servers.... we use SLX250 and Wupro from IPswitch to cover all requirements... the TCO for the software and hardare was less than $10k and this worked out less than a tenth of what something like HPOpenview would have cost to implement...

I am v happy thus far... altho as with everything there is always room for improvement

Martin J. Hamilton... lost in a sea of snmp...

dancoh

My company choose Orion because it is most "Bang for the Buck". But I can still have some suggestions and complaints.

Cheers
Daniel Cohen

dancoh

Jonchill, as for the syslog server. It most definetly is necessary to have a syslog server. But the syslog server included with Orion is not up to snuff. It cannot archive log files. It does not have an advanced enough filter system. It's a good try...... But not good enough.

I therefore use Kiwi Syslog Daemon. Much better.

Cheers
Daniel Cohen

ladato

In regard to alerts: What I desperately need is root-cause alerts. Don't tell me about the switches when the router is down. Don't tell me about the serves on teh switch when the switch is down, etc.

Part and parcel of that is some way to link devices (either manually, which would suck, or automatically which is what I need) so that there is awareness of "root cause" events versus "associated events".

I'm in a position where we may add from 20-50,000 devices in the next 6 months, and ongoing we need to add thousands of devices in hundreds of sites at (more or less) the drop of a hat.

I have worked with Tivoli, OpenView, NetIQ and Nagios and find SolarWinds to be the most full-featured package for the price. Most now have the ability to scan a network and determine inter-connections and then modify alerts based on those connections. I'm hoping this is coming in V8 as well!

Leon

snowjay

For root cause alerting I just make sure I have accurate alert suppressions that do exactly what you mention. I always have a supression for the device before it, or the switch if I'm dealing with servers.

Now that only takes care of the emails that get sent out, the Orion home page still will look like a festive christmas tree while showing everything down.

ladato

the issue, snowjay, is one of scale. Given enough time I can craft alert suppression rules. But when a new customer comes on with 950 sites and 2-5 devices per site, and no naming standard which would tell me much about them, things get tricky.

example:

router connects to 2 core switches
2 core switches connect to 6 switches located on each floor of a building.
floor switches connect to various servers, devices, etc.

So given that basic architecture, with no "indicative" naming standard (ie: nothing to tell me switch 3 is connected to core switch 1 or 2) how can I determine root cause failure in my alarms.

With over 3,000 devices coming on in one shot, and new customers coming on each month, I need something more than a manual effort.

Leon

NHeidler

Bumping for 2006.

Any new news about version 8?

How's the custom MIB import/creation looking?

jneiberger

I would really like to see someone from Orion follow up on this post. As I've mentioned a bunch of times already, we're currently evaluating several different network management applications. Orion would be my first choice if it had just a few more features. We have a meeting/demo with Concord (CA) tomorrow about the eHealth product. It has everything we want and more, but it's far more complex than Orion, will require more setup/training/maintenance, and it costs a LOT more. I'd really love to hear what features are going to be coming in Orion v8.

I guess what I'm saying is this: please stop me from recommending Concord!

If Orion did just a bit more of what we need, I think I'd be less attracted to Concord.

Thanks,
John

ladato

In the last 3 months we've evaluated (had on-site demos) from Concord and SMARTS.

jneiberger: I will tell you now that, unless money is no object, Concord will fail due to price (especially as compared to SW!) They charge per "element" which is a single OID, port, VLAN, IP, etc. So one router could comprise 6-10 "elements" and you get charged (I think it's around $60 per) for each. You can push back on that and they will change their pricing model, just an FYI.

SMARTS is about 3 times more expensive and has no built-in portal/web display. Nor does it keep statistics that aren't errors (ie: no utilization stats). You can get that using 3rd party tools, but now you are juggling multiple vendors.

I had a call with SolarWinds folks about these issues - the need to determine device dependencing during discovery (I honestly didn't mean for that much alliteration!) and root-cause analysis during alerting (the two are obviously linked).

We are in the same position.

Please, SolarWinds, do something to help me avoid having to buy someone else's product!!

clerum

If I could say there is one real flaw with Orion and solarwinds it is a lack of defined road map with timelines.

We converted over our NMS from Openview in Q304 with the expectation from Solarwinds sales that custom mib support would be beta in Q404 and production ready in Q105.

It's now Q1 2006. They have deployed new products...but have yet to provide the support that we were promised, and again no published road map for these features.

gbrance

We bought SolarWinds with the expectation that V8 would be out with custom MIB support by 4Q05. It is now 1Q06 and still no official answer from SolarWinds as to the expected release date of V8 with custom MIB support. It would be nice to get some type of official answer as to the estimated release date of this product.

GB

Mithrilhall

Things I would love to see in v8:

Custom MIB support (just like everyone else wants)

ASP Pages that are modular (I know the code is encrypted but if they could break it up a bit and add in some comments it would make my life easier. I would love to add some custom features for our equipment...such as displaying the MAC address that is currently connected to a port on a switch.)

Support for other Databases (such as Oracle & MySQL)

trm33

I just talked to sales and they said v8 will not be out until 3rd quarter.

Mithrilhall

3rd Quarter......Oh well. I guess I'll just keep adding custom pieces until then.

On a side note...

I found this today and it works pretty good for spicing up gauges and graphs.
www.maani.us/.../index.php

Now, if Solarwinds could build something like this into Orion I would be ecstatic.

Mithrilhall

Another feature I would love to have added is animated backgrounds supported for Maps. Animated gif support would be great but if they could add swf support as well that would be even better.

jonchill

quote:Originally posted by trm33

I just talked to sales and they said v8 will not be out until 3rd quarter.

If that's true then we are not going to get many upgrades or extra features for the best part of 8 months, assuming of course that they keep to the schedule and it doesn't drop off into 2007.

jneiberger

quote:Originally posted by Mithrilhall

3rd Quarter......Oh well. I guess I'll just keep adding custom pieces until then.

On a side note...

I found this today and it works pretty good for spicing up gauges and graphs.
www.maani.us/.../index.php

Now, if Solarwinds could build something like this into Orion I would be ecstatic.

Wow, those are awesome charts! They'd be a great addition to Orion.

lavelanet

I would still like to know if Solarwinds is going to include support for a newer version of net-snmp. Unix support doesn't feel like a priority.

And I'd really like some sort of disk activiry monitoring at least in windows to start. Since we're now all waiting probably another year for V8 could we squeeze these things in?

jasnicholas

I highly agree with lavelanet. Better Unix support would get a flood of users since there is not really anything else worth while out there that charges less then $250 per node and has an agent. Disk I/O and paging would be a great addition for Unix support.

clerum

quote:Originally posted by trm33

I just talked to sales and they said v8 will not be out until 3rd quarter.

Can we get an offical confirmation from SolarWinds on this. This this is the case...this is bad.