ctmidnight

That's a nice story joe; but cast a critical eye on all that fluffy Microsift sales jargon... I still have Scars from MOM, SCOM v1 (the non-working edition) and SCOM 2007 R2. The truth is that none of these solutions scale up past a certain point without pain, and they often let the users find where that limit exists.

Yep; we need to keep this on the RADAR!

SNMP-based polling technically has a higher priority on some managed nodes; making it slightly more reliable on targets with high system utilization; the down side (in addition to what was already stated) is that SNMP-only availability polling also incurs more overhead than ICMP echoes. In theory; the tool already knows…

We are struggling to develop a supportable method for creating incident tickets in CA Service Desk from Orion advanced alerts... Leon; I like the way you think!

Perhaps, but it's not any more prone to failure than the fifty million database hacks folks have to do in Orion so it'll perform all the tasks we need it to do in the real world. I'm surprised that they have not added more secure (HTTPS) method support to the alert action option list... It could be easily done and provide…

These are great ideas that use the custom properties in ways that bend the product to do more than the creators envisioned. My only reservation in using this approach is that it requires dynamic insert/updates to the database that are not high in IRF (idiot resistance factor), and thus they are prone to being screwed up by…

We don't even get the pop-up, because the server must have Excel installed in order for the web server to source it.

I'm submitting a feature request to support the use of external data sources (like patching schedules exported from patch management tools in xml or spreadsheet formats). We have been asked to provide an automated solution to import or at least interrogate the patch calendars used by our patching teams at different sites…

Thanks for the update... Alas; we must wait even longer! The lack of advanced alert-type capabilities such as an HTTP POST are beginning to be a deal-breaker with this product. We are forced to use an ancient in-bound email interface to our ticketing system for trap alerts, which is the only thing that still uses this, and…

I used to support a distributed system and application monitoring framework called Team Agent, which had its own simple scripting logic that could be coded into the alert rule to filter the event data, check external conditions and variables and perform other tests before executing one or more alert actions; all within one…

Here is the excerpt from the NPM 11.5 Admin Guide (Page 407), explaining the use of the GET or POST URL functions as automatic actions. Besides the aforementioned absence of HTTPS support; what else is wrong with this statement?: Using Get or Post URL Functions "SolarWinds can be configured to communicate alerts using HTTP…

Thanks for your information on this subject. We are being tasked to begin polling Tail Drop Packet metrics on some of our Juniper devices, and I've built a couple pollers to record stats on jnxCosIfqTailDropPkts and jnxCosIfqTailDropPktRate. The jnxCosIfqTailDropPkts poller is not behaving as I expected, since the target…

We used to be able to balance polling engines "en-masse" from the primary, but that was removed a while back.

Now we need an integration with CA Service Desk too!

I believe the decent compromise would be to give the user the ability to logically group certain devices to follow rules for automated poller load balancing, and tag some devices as ineligible (root them to a specific poller for DMZ nodes, for instance).

Jfrazier is right; this functionality exists in other competitive tools, and it should not be terribly difficult to configure in Orion... A "retention period" of sorts before objects flagged for deletion are dropped from the database. Brandon.Austin's suggestion about using the grey-out feature is also a good one.. It…

Thanks for the info. I'd be interested to take a look at that script, if you happen to have it around. Not being a PowerShell guru myself, I have tested a few pieces of freeware that can act as an HTTPS transport (like cURL)

Looks like we're stuck with more cheesy workarounds (homegrown database hacks or other grassroots efforts) until the voters are finally heard and something is done.... I'm perplexed because this just doesn't sound that difficult to achieve.

My kingdom for an alert action to perform a JSON call or at least an HTTPS POST function! Let's drag "Advanced Alerts" into the 21st century.

having to do policy administration in multiple places for alerts and notification is not supportable in a large environment, and it's not intuitive to the monitoring team that must support policies on multiple instances of Orion. The fact that trap alerts are not viewable in the alert browser also makes them difficult to…

Most common observed issue with our external pollers is when they have a process like svchost.exe or w3wp.exe using excessive system resources, and the poller stops processing work or starting new tasks... The poller itself rarely croaks. So the neat trick would be to monitor internal logs for specific errors and initiate…

I'm excited about the prospect of this feature becoming available. By designating specific custom properties as mandatory, one could have at least their default value added to the node when it gets added. Regular running of the "rat reports" to check for accuracy would still be needed, but at leat the must-have items could…

My Kingdom for a Data Warehouse! We're trying to cobble together our own using a dedicated SQL instance and SRS / SWIA API, but the API does not have all the bits we need exposed yet, and the cumbersome process of replication from multiple instances of Orion into the repository are a challenge. With some smarts in the…

Thanks for your comments Sir; I feel your pain. We are getting ready to enter a crisis once we migrate our ticketing system into a web API-based integration with Orion instead of email-based integration, because traps do not support this, and SQL queries are proving unreliable as they can cause duplicate alerts for trap…

The win for SolarWinds would be twofold; their customers would enjoy better performance from an operational DB that is more lean & mean, and the stats that we love to hoard and report on could be squirreled away and queried out-of-band. All the products (including the evil custom pollers) could write out data to their…

How about collecting metrics out of JMX interface attributes... alerting on thread count violations; load times outside of mean avg; slow calls trending outside of avg; etc.

Thanks for your comments... This need has become so urgent in our shop that it may actually cause our management to replace the SolarWinds tools if they cannot support this simple bit of functionality. Our customers have been waiting for us to migrate to this new incident / change management system with integrated CMDB,…

SolarWinds; It's not just for "Mom & Pop shops" anymore! We have four instances of Orion in production with two more on the way. One instance has ten polling engines and five external web servers using a clustered SQL database: Products in use include: Orion Platform 2015.1.1, SAM 6.2.0, QoE 2.0, IPAM 4.3, NCM 7.3.2, NPM…

I went back to our network architect and asked this very question. The response was still ambiguous, but I gather that their desire is to have me price out and install an instance of SolarWinds Orion within the Amazon cloud to monitor servers and apps in the AWS environment.

I'm running 1.6.1 at this time... waiting for the new one like everyone else.