Open for Voting

My list of ideas (gripes) with SW - New Customer

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" emoticons_happy.png

Versions:

  1. SAM: 6.3
  2. NPM: 12.0.1
  3. DPA: 10.2.0
  4. NTA: 4.2.1

  1. Allow more functionality on mass scale
    1. Application scans:
      1. 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.
      2. Allow variables to application scans to find services with like names, but NOT exactly the same
        1. 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.
      3. Add a Search function to the "Assigned Application Monitors" tab similar to the "Application Monitor Templates" tab.
        1. 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.
        2. There is a search box in the "Application Monitor Templates" tab, why not this one?
    2. Add/Remove Node resources
      1. 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.
      2. I need to be able to remove the A: drive some all my resources at once, or at least a large amount each time.
      3. As it stands noow I have to go to manage nodes and deselect 5000 A: drives.
    3. Network Discovery
      1. 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....
      2. Network Scan Ignore list
        1. 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.
        2. 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 ?
      3. If I have many scans setup, why do I have go to every single one to make a basic change for all of them?
        1. Allow making a change across multiple Scans at once simiilar to how you can make a basic node change to mulitple nodes.
      4. More clearly define volume scanning as they relate to hardware or OS types
        1. What is the difference between Virtual and Flash Memory?
        2. What is the difference between RAM and RAM disk?
      5. Allow copy/paste/edit current discoveries to save time for many different scan types.
        1. Would save A LOT of time if you could duplicate a scan, tweak the settings and name, then move on.
        2. Similar to how you can copy/paste alerts or Templates.
      6. Allow to select or deselect applications to be monitored in the Auto Monitor App page.
        1. Let me add my own
        2. Let me remove all of them for every scan at once
        3. Let me have a setting that I can add a group of templates or NONE.
      7. Rework the "Scheduled Discovery Results" page
        1. The results are convoluted, confusing and unorganized
          1. Sort by date (after many scans) are not sorted by ascending or descending order. They are jumbled up.
          2. 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.
        2. Rework the "Choose what to monitor" screens in the Auto scan setup.
          1. Better description of results. I feel like this screen can be vastly improved.
            1. Port mode?
            2. Virtual?
            3. Physical?
  2. Custom Properties
    1. Make custom properties able to auto populate, similar to how group dynamic queries work.
      1. 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.
      2. This is already done with groups, custom properties is probably the MOST valuable part of SW.
      3. Why can it not work for this too?
  3. Have more common errors (component, node etc) display troubled shooting steps below the error.
    1. IE: Components grayed out could mean a few things
      1. WMI permissions
      2. Counters need to be reset via lodctr /R
      3. Counters need to be checked to verify they are not disabled via: lodctr /q
      4. Query error means = Change "Disable Performance Counters" registry key to 0
    2. Things like that. Make the error descriptions more informative.
  4. Upgrades
    1. 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.
      1. 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.
      2. 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.
    2. Make the process faster for larger environments.
      1. It took me 3hrs to upgrade NPM and SAM. Seriously, 3hrs??
      2. What the heck is the "Configuration Manager" doing for 3hrs?
        1. 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.
        2. This should not take this long...
      3. I have seen some movement on this with the scalable deployment tool with a recent release.
        1. However it will not work for people like me who's servers cannot connect to the internet.
        2. This WOULD be great if it worked by polling the main webserver/polling engine and downloading from that though.
        3. Would be awesome if I only neede to update one instead of close to 8 servers, which includes my DR environment.
  5. Dashboard/View Management
    1. Current system (looong list of every single dashboard) seems clunky and hard to use.
    1. 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…
    2. Need some kind of function to be able to filter out views and copy/paste templates. Or even create templates.
  6. Reporting
    1. 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.