Micro-monitoring Terminals?

Question

So newbie question. I took over managing NPM for our environment, but I'm relatively new to in-depth network monitoring in general let alone many of the Solarwinds products.

My question being, how far down the hierarchy do you include in NPM monitoring? Basically, is there a benefit to including terminals like end user devices, kiosk, etc in NPM monitoring. Bearing in mind that we are a mid-sized company but it's really only 2 people, myself included, that monitors and manages our environment.

Or is there another Solarwinds product for monitoring and managing these devices that can connect up/integrate with NPM?

mesverrum · Answer

You could definitely do that in Orion, as long as you have enough licenses.

You probably will want to set up the logic in your alerts not to be constantly blowing yourself up with messages about end users rebooting their machines or shutting them down at the end of the day or whatever.

I think the point where it becomes impractical is when you have enough end user gear to have it require you to buy an extra polling engine (~12000 elements) because most businesses wouldn't justify spending 20k to map end users.

langhamit · Answer

I manage all end user devices, from the setup process to monitoring usage to updating. So basically everything except security.

But my intention is really to simply create a visual connection with the switches and other nodes they connect through. I would like to integrate their monitoring with NPM in order to build maps that monitor their connectivity over the network as well. One of the projects I am working on is getting proper monitoring (proper monitoring in my opinion) up for all of our systems that we can stay informed at all times throughout the day. With both macro-scale and micro-scale monitoring. As I am the one that normally monitors all of these devices I'm trying to simplify it in an efficiently visual way.

mesverrum · Answer

Most companies don't monitor workstations with Orion, but there's not a technical limitation as much as it's an administrative and process hassle. What on a end user system do you have a responsibility to proactively address?