byrona ✭✭✭✭✭

Apparently there is a known issue with it that sounds like it definitely does not impact everybody. If you are hit by it you will probably experience issues in your WebUI loading up node pages and in the Orion logs you will see Deadlocks. You can also see them with AppInsight for SQL if you use that to monitor your Orion…

While this all sounds simple enough, I can tell you from experience that it isn't. We just purchased WebHelpDesk and have just started the implementation process to move away from our old ticketing system. The old system has very inefficient workflows as it has grown organically over time and organic growth is almost…

I have gone ahead and created a parallel Feature Request for this. https://thwack.solarwinds.com/ideas/7772

One of the components I started doing when interviewing people for my organization is testing their "whiteboading" skills which is essentially a form of communication but one that is very important in our industry. It's important that folks be able to participate and and communicate different ideas and architectures on a…

I would love to see such a thing as well. Based on what I have seen in the industry the answers would be all over the board and not nearly as standardized as one may think.

network defender​ I totally agree with you on this. The question then becomes who should be responsible? Should home users be expected to be more aware and secure their stuff or should the product vendors enforce better security on their products out-of-the-box?

We have your back on this , we all are stuck in a position where we need to manage devices which includes SNMP Traps and Syslog and Orion really fails in those departments. It seems to me it would make sense to treat Syslog and Traps the same as NCM and give them their own database. This would allow you to optimize the DB…

Currently we only monitor website performance locally. Years ago we used Pingdom and following that we used Keynote for remote distributed performance uptime monitoring; however, I was never very impressed with those tools. I found Keynote to be especially bad due to an incredibly clunky interface. I would love to have WPM…

Ugg I see your pain point there. Until you have an agentless solution, do you have any good way to mass deploy those agents?

In other words, Orion is doing data collections in local time and converting it to UTC for the graphs that are stored in UTC. At least that is what this behavior would suggest.

I certainly don't look forward to the idea of trying to re-train a system to stop applying the wrong fix to a problem when it insists it knows better even though it doesn't. The biggest challenge with systems fixing themselves is the contextual knowledge that humans have that systems don't. This is why I always compare…

Organizations often pay lip service to wanting documentation but don't really give engineers the time to actually write it. That said, I would have to say that the biggest hurdle to writing good documentation is primarily that it's not something that tends to be taught in our field. It's seen as boring and uninteresting…

I think this provides a great structure for folks to use to begin to get their arms around this problem at their company. I particularly like the fact that it starts with a solid policy. It's important that your policy have the proper endorsement and backing of management if it's going to be successful. The biggest…

As far as the SolarWinds portfolio of products is concerned I personally find LEM is the best tool to detect these types of issues; assuming you have configured it to so such. With that said, taking the time to configure and mange the configurations of such things in perpetuity can be a real challenge. I am hoping that…

IT becomes part of you. This couldn't be more true. IT is more than a job or a career, it's a lifestyle. When I try to explain this to other people including my wife they just don't get it.

We have a pretty good network backup system in place using NCM. We have a change review process that includes the specific configuration changes but it is still a bit disconnected from the backup system and therefore doesn't provide a great way to compare. This year we will be putting in the automation system and are…

This would be a very useful feature for us as well!

We are constantly getting scolded for not keeping as-built documentation up to date. It's not a deliberate attempt to not do it, it's just a matter of conflicting priorities and as you said, as soon as you complete it the documentation is already out of date. I am trying more and more to be able to use the monitoring…

Thanks for the quick response. We just recently deployed VMAN and don't have it connected to much yet and have not yet integrated it with Orion. I am in the process of working to upgrade my Orion systems from Windows 2008 R2 to Windows 2012 R2 before I do anything else. Once I do that I am wondering if it wouldn't just…

While I totally agree there is always the right tools for the right job, that doesn't mean you will always be fortunate enough to have that right tool. Sometimes you get stuck using the hammer not because you want to but because it's the only tool that you have. I may not always have the right tools but I always need to…

Crap, now I am hungry too! I might have to have breakfast for dinner. 

I always want to caution people about #2 as cost savings (or efficiencies) are not immediately recognized or obvious. To really take advantage of cost efficiencies in the cloud you really need to re-platform your applications to leverage the capabilities of the cloud. Unfortunately most attempts at cloud migrations don't…

I was totally just talking to a co-worker about that Looney Tunes cartoon this week and went and watched an episode of it!

You can poll through other NIC's on a polling engine if the NIC is on s different network. You will need to add a static route to the system so it knows when to send packets out the other interface. We do this with both of our polling engines. Sent from my iPhone

Ah, that makes more sense. I haven't worked with any of those aside from the Azure Site Recovery which works well but is more of a replication/DR solution than a backup solution.

DevOps is one of those titles or terms you see getting used all over in this industry but ultimately I really don't see how it's much different (if at all) than what we have had all along. Have we not always had developers that supported or worked with operations departments?

Maybe it's easier if you don't think about it as saying goodbye to yesterday but instead saying hello to tomorrow. For me the best part about working in this industry is that there is always something new around the corner.

I would agree, I think we need to see vendors taking more responsibility both in making their products more secure and forcing users to follow best practices in a way that is easy for them.

I really wish I could have gone to this event! A few of our VP's are there so maybe you will get to meet them. Seems maybe at some point they would like to send some of us tech folks in the company to these tech events. 

This is a great post! You mention the importance of continuous monitoring which I agree is key. It's also important to view the monitoring practice itself as one of continuous improvement. With each failure we can usually find ways to improve our monitoring to better identify the issue before it becomes an apocolypse. You…