So I am a fairly new customer to Solarwinds. I am pretty much the monitoring "guru" for my company, or "head monitoring geek" (like SW folks like to label themselves). We are a cloud services provider and I am in charge of monitoring close to 5000 servers spread all over the world, in multiple datacenters.
Let me just start off by saying SW is great. I have thoroughly enjoyed deploying it, configuring it, scaling etc. My users love it as well.
That being said, I feel like there are SO SO many things SAM can improve on or add to make its customers happy. I have been building this list over the past few weeks. Some may sound like gripes, but they are genuine issues that either would improve functionality or cut the time I spend on a specific topic in half.
DISCLAIMER: MOST of these issues are things I have already run by support. If there are ways to accomplish these items in a better way or I am missing something, I would love to hear feedback. Most of this list is what I would for sure consider "tongue and cheek" but its also me typing the list as I see the issue and many times POUNDING on the key thinking "why doesnt this EXIST"
Versions:
- SAM: 6.3
- NPM: 12.0.1
- DPA: 10.2.0
- NTA: 4.2.1
- Allow more functionality on mass scale
- Application scans:
- The ability to scan a server and choose what services to monitor from the results instead of forcing me to choose a template before I scan.
- Allow variables to application scans to find services with like names, but NOT exactly the same
- IE: an Oracle service that is named: OracleTnslistener75479 < let me add a wildcard for that service that would look like: OracleTnsListener*** so that it picks up ALL of my Oracle listeners. As it stands now, I have to add each service manually and create the template manually. And I cannot add the template to a group, because there are no variable checks to allow the template to find them.
- Add a Search function to the "Assigned Application Monitors" tab similar to the "Application Monitor Templates" tab.
- Because variables are not allowed when creating/adding templates based on Windows Services, we have MANY different templates. Scrolling through all of them wastes a lot of time.
- There is a search box in the "Application Monitor Templates" tab, why not this one?
- Add/Remove Node resources
- If I have 5000 servers that mistakenly are monitoring the A:, I need to either delete and rescan them, then re-add all of the applications or go through each of the 5000 servers and delete the A: drive resource.
- I need to be able to remove the A: drive some all my resources at once, or at least a large amount each time.
- As it stands noow I have to go to manage nodes and deselect 5000 A: drives.
- Network Discovery
- Have a proper "bread crumb" trail for the Network Discovery (similar to the Alert setup process), so I can make 1 change, then jump the end without having to click through the ENTIRE wizard every.. single... time....
- Network Scan Ignore list
- Allow adding IP addresses from a list to be added to the scan ignore list. Instead of having to add straight from the results page.
- My environment is about 99.99% Virtual. If I want to ignore all of the network hardware (Switches, firewalls etc), I have to scan all of my network IP's with ICMP and then create the ignore list? Why can't I just open the ignore list and drop in IP's ?
- If I have many scans setup, why do I have go to every single one to make a basic change for all of them?
- Allow making a change across multiple Scans at once simiilar to how you can make a basic node change to mulitple nodes.
- More clearly define volume scanning as they relate to hardware or OS types
- What is the difference between Virtual and Flash Memory?
- What is the difference between RAM and RAM disk?
- Allow copy/paste/edit current discoveries to save time for many different scan types.
- Would save A LOT of time if you could duplicate a scan, tweak the settings and name, then move on.
- Similar to how you can copy/paste alerts or Templates.
- Allow to select or deselect applications to be monitored in the Auto Monitor App page.
- Let me add my own
- Let me remove all of them for every scan at once
- Let me have a setting that I can add a group of templates or NONE.
- Rework the "Scheduled Discovery Results" page
- The results are convoluted, confusing and unorganized
- Sort by date (after many scans) are not sorted by ascending or descending order. They are jumbled up.
- Found vs Changed vs Imported seems unclear. If a node is found, but its already in Orion, why is it in the Found menu? For the app found? Ok make an App Found category so I don’t have to scroll through 100 servers looking for that 1 that wasn’t actually in Orion already.
- Rework the "Choose what to monitor" screens in the Auto scan setup.
- Better description of results. I feel like this screen can be vastly improved.
- Port mode?
- Virtual?
- Physical?
- Better description of results. I feel like this screen can be vastly improved.
- The results are convoluted, confusing and unorganized
- Application scans:
- Custom Properties
- Make custom properties able to auto populate, similar to how group dynamic queries work.
- All of my servers/devices follow a similar naming scheme. So I know if my DB server is discovered that night, it will include a common name. Solarwinds should be able to find it and add a designed set of custom properties for that server.
- This is already done with groups, custom properties is probably the MOST valuable part of SW.
- Why can it not work for this too?
- Make custom properties able to auto populate, similar to how group dynamic queries work.
- Have more common errors (component, node etc) display troubled shooting steps below the error.
- IE: Components grayed out could mean a few things
- WMI permissions
- Counters need to be reset via lodctr /R
- Counters need to be checked to verify they are not disabled via: lodctr /q
- Query error means = Change "Disable Performance Counters" registry key to 0
- Things like that. Make the error descriptions more informative.
- IE: Components grayed out could mean a few things
- Upgrades
- Not sure everyone is aware, but when you upgrade NPM or SAM, it auto selects/resets many discovery scan settings including "Search for available applications" check marks.
- I have about 15 difference discovery scans. Every I update, I have to go through every…single….scan… and change / uncheck the Auto Apply Scan settings…HUGE waste of time.
- If I forget, the scan auto adds all the "default" templates SW thinks the server needs and I have to delete them again...all individually.
- Make the process faster for larger environments.
- It took me 3hrs to upgrade NPM and SAM. Seriously, 3hrs??
- What the heck is the "Configuration Manager" doing for 3hrs?
- I know it depends on you DB server, but my SW environment is running on 10GB network, all have at least 10 vCPUs and 40GB of RAM.
- This should not take this long...
- I have seen some movement on this with the scalable deployment tool with a recent release.
- However it will not work for people like me who's servers cannot connect to the internet.
- This WOULD be great if it worked by polling the main webserver/polling engine and downloading from that though.
- Would be awesome if I only neede to update one instead of close to 8 servers, which includes my DR environment.
- Not sure everyone is aware, but when you upgrade NPM or SAM, it auto selects/resets many discovery scan settings including "Search for available applications" check marks.
- Dashboard/View Management
- Current system (looong list of every single dashboard) seems clunky and hard to use.
- No search or filter function. I have a view for every private cloud customer I have. If I want to find it, I am scrolling and scrolling and scrolling…
- Need some kind of function to be able to filter out views and copy/paste templates. Or even create templates.
- Reporting
- I can add reports from the old report writer as resource to a page, but I cannot add a web based report?
Whew thats a lot, but I wanted to throw these out there. I am prepared to be shellacked saying I may be wanting too much or whatever, but that's ok.
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