I just got tasked to see if SolarWinds can monitor access to files and shares.
Has anyone done this before and if so what was the solution?
Thanks
Chris
If you're looking to monitor File Existence, File Change, File/Directory Size, File Share accessibility, etc. then this is very easily accomplished using Server & Application Monitor. If you're looking to audit users accessing files/shares, this is a task better suited for Log & Event Manager.
When you mention you want to monitor access to files and shares than I am assuming you want an audit trail of who is accessing what on Windows or CIFS file shares. If this is the case you have a number of options available
1. Enable auditing on the file servers (file object access auditing) and use your log\event manager to read these. I would recommend you test this first on a non business critical server as the logs can fill up very fast. You can limit the monitoring to specific folders if it impacts on server performance too much
2. Use a deep packet inspection (DPI) product that can monitor the traffic going to and from the file servers. Products in this space can extract the file activity from network traffic so that you have the least impact on the file servers.
Can Storage Manager do this on the Filer side?
Storage Manager can periodically analyze the files on local drives and shares (NFS and CIFS), giving you both summary data (by age, ownership, type) and detailed file meta data (based on your file rules). We don't monitor access (how much a file is being accessed or who accessed it last), but we do get information on create date, last modified, last read.
What are you trying to accomplish? That would help answer the question better.
Brian
Have a look at this video and see if its the sort of data you are after. This is a DPI tool monitoring traffic to file servers and using the Orion interface to report on the data. You may need to skip on to half way to see the file share access reporting
NetFort LANGuardian & SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXmEZeNM_BU
Hi,
What permissions are required on shared path of NAS storage for the user that we configure in Storage profiler Maintenance and Collector Services?
I tried to find this in solar winds document but nothing mentioned about this.