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Just starting as solarwinds admin and Im looking for some solarwinds best practices... HELP!

i am just starting a position as a solarwinds admin and i am just looking for some documents or just some helpful best practices and some do's and donts.

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Accepted answers

ashley.heilbronn

Hi kelly.ellison,

Here are some best practices I've learned for myself, i've looked after 2 solarwinds instances over the past 5 years, one was at a Refinery, Mine and Port where i was a network sys admin,it was just a one man show and my current gig .

Create your own dashboard and views with some stuff that is relative to you? I've added the show last 25 audit logs as the 1st thing I see, I like to know who is access SW and where from (IP Address).
Create a organize grouping structure for your nodes you are monitoring that works for your role, my company has a global presence about 190 offices or so, so my group nesting looks like this Company > Region > Country > City > Office > Office RTR > Office LAN
Dynamic queries for groups, learn how to define dynamic queries to help automate the population of groups.
Setup your dependency for your groups, like in my nesting above, if my RTR group goes down than than my LAN group is unreachable which tells the polling, hey back off on the polling on the LAN infrastructure, till it becomes reachable again, and reduce the load on the poller.
Custom Properties, I've only just started using these bad boys and whole cow, these are very helpful in a lot ways, one such way is converting a inventory listing about our circuit providers for our office routers, which means i can build very flexible alerting schemes.
If you have SAMs as apart of your build, deploy all the solarwinds application monitors to your monitoring environment, and monitor of every aspect of your build, IIS insight, SQL insight for database server, QoE Server sensors for solarwinds servers and database, vmware polling for database server and solarwinds server, EVERYTHING!!, it gives you very deep understanding how everything works with each other and you can mature with the appstack approach.
don't be afraid to try new things is the most important thing, get a virtual environment setup with SW with virtual box and GNS3 on a machine with decent CPU and RAM and run wild with it.
set up meetings with stakeholders and ask the question how can the monitoring/reporting help you?

All comments

mcam

I really good place to start is the new customer success site at https://support.solarwinds.com/Success_Center

It's a mine of official docs and training etc

mrs.alterego

One of our MVP's CourtesyIT put together several different documents but there is a really good one targeted at new SolarWinds users. I would recommend reviewing his document and all the content he has listed in that document. You can find his document here.

CourtesyIT

You Don't Know thwack - The Onboarding Mission

Getting Started with NPM

NPM Core Training

Solarwinds Labs - One Stop Shop

How to do various customizations with your Solarw...

Everything DISA STIGs for your Network

designerfx

FYI depending on how new "new" is, you might want to keep in mind new people/training issues in that you're probably going to need 3-6 months minimum to truly be comfortable with everything.

kelly.ellison

I was just trying to get some basic tips and tricks. I'm really starting to like the thwack community i feel like everyone is very helpful!!

neomatrix1217

I would watch these videos SolarWinds Orion Platform Training (2015) - YouTube

ashley.heilbronn

Hi kelly.ellison,

Create your own dashboard and views with some stuff that is relative to you? I've added the show last 25 audit logs as the 1st thing I see, I like to know who is access SW and where from (IP Address).
Create a organize grouping structure for your nodes you are monitoring that works for your role, my company has a global presence about 190 offices or so, so my group nesting looks like this Company > Region > Country > City > Office > Office RTR > Office LAN
Dynamic queries for groups, learn how to define dynamic queries to help automate the population of groups.
Setup your dependency for your groups, like in my nesting above, if my RTR group goes down than than my LAN group is unreachable which tells the polling, hey back off on the polling on the LAN infrastructure, till it becomes reachable again, and reduce the load on the poller.
Custom Properties, I've only just started using these bad boys and whole cow, these are very helpful in a lot ways, one such way is converting a inventory listing about our circuit providers for our office routers, which means i can build very flexible alerting schemes.
If you have SAMs as apart of your build, deploy all the solarwinds application monitors to your monitoring environment, and monitor of every aspect of your build, IIS insight, SQL insight for database server, QoE Server sensors for solarwinds servers and database, vmware polling for database server and solarwinds server, EVERYTHING!!, it gives you very deep understanding how everything works with each other and you can mature with the appstack approach.
don't be afraid to try new things is the most important thing, get a virtual environment setup with SW with virtual box and GNS3 on a machine with decent CPU and RAM and run wild with it.
set up meetings with stakeholders and ask the question how can the monitoring/reporting help you?