discoposse

Haha very true! There are folks who do like to see all of the up/down detail. What I try to do for that is to ensure them that it is all logged, but the email should be treated like a secondary step. It is challenging to meet everyone's needs for sure.

This is all too familiar, I used to call it Otto-mate. I had a guy in operations named Otto who did manual processes for us

This is definitely a common theme Marc. Thanks for the feedback. It really is a challenge to find the right tool that can cover all bases with IPAM. I've had such good luck with the SolarWinds tools for a lot of other management features so I think I'll dive in over the next month to see if I can get things tied in nicely…

That is an interesting challenge on multiple scheduled outages. This where having the SDK trigger an unmanage process from the patch management system would integrate nicely so that the system is self-maintaining. Looks like I've got some investigation ahead of me to get a good process cooked up!

Great info! I think all of the vendor solutions have that last step to really gain adoption by becoming more dynamic. It's a challenge to get that fully connected IPAM, but stay in a nice price model. I've used other ISP style IP management tools (Lucent QIP, now VitalQIP) which was great, but it had to be the product in…

+1 for cobbler and chef! It is nice to see those great tools working together for you. I feel your pain on the fear of coding issues. I often see this with teams and it takes a while to build that comfort level. Creation of servers is an "easier" first step, but putting trust in the fully automated deletion of resources…

Good to know Richard. I seem to get a lot of folks who line up with the same requirements. I love the idea of the multi-node unmanage option. That would be my number 1 feature request for sure in the absence of a full RESTful API.

These are certainly exciting times! Agreed that the shift is slow for many, but it is definitely becoming an inevitable direction IMHO. It will take longer as we adopt the new methods for some. It will be a long tail of adoption from top down. I'll do my best to open the SMB market up to the options for sure because I…

Thanks for the great detailed feedback Charles! It is great to see the various options and how it may come into play for different types of environments. I liked the depth of the case study you did for Infoblox. It certainly looks like you've gotten great integration and mileage from your implementation.

There are definitely a lot of ways to skin the cat on this one. I'm using a mix and match of PowerShell scripts, SCCM, vCO and still a sprinkling of manual for different processes. Slowly getting closer to a more orchestrated overall process. It's a challenge, but the time won back in the end is well worth it.

There are options in the Advanced Alert section to exclude some nodes from sending out emails, but they still log. You can create a Group and set that as the exclusion. I've started working on some exotic email notification scenarios and it is proving to be a pretty flexible tool in that way.

Excel and Ping FTW! I've done this one along the way and luckily the SolarWinds tool got me to the next level of management. Now I hope to go the extra mile and fully manage with the full IPAM features. Fingers crossed!!

The SDK is pretty cool. I've got to spend some time with it and dig into the programming a bit more. I do a lot of PowerShell scripting, but I have only dabbled with full development platforms like .NET. Something for many folks in the sysadmin side is that we are definitely needing to be a jack of many trades to fully…

I'll have to take a look at that. Thanks for letting me know about it

Group management would be really great too. I should dig into the SDK and see if there is a way to affect servers based on group membership. I do some alerting based on group, but never tried managing/unmanaging tasks.

It is tough to find the sweet spot for cost versus feature depending on the size of the environment and amount of the integration you can achieve.

Great stuff. All of the comments have been helpful to see that many of us have arrived at the same crossroads with similar thoughts on what is next.

A common message here that many folks do still want to see the down/up cycle in their monitoring even though it generates a lot of traffic. I just worry about what I call "notification blindness" where too many false positive alerts hide some genuine issues and they get missed.

Great stuff, and very true. Whether we are ready or not, this is coming

Great write up! I'm working to try to get as much in vCenter Orchestrator as possible, but I've done Puppet also which is great for cross-platform and cross-silo (network, server, desktop) so I think it has good chances to take a strong hold out in the wild. The trick for many is to pick up languages. I'd say that Python…

Very cool Marc! I'm mixing up some configuration between SCCM and vCenter Orchestrator. I've seen LANDesk used by some organizations and it seems like a great way to centralize a lot of the configuration.

Definitely a common theme here among most of the responses that unmanaging devices isn't a high priority during patch cycles. Thanks for the great feedback.

Great feedback on IPAM and how it can really work! There should definitely be a way to hold an IP for a while so that you can ensure it won't go back into the pool of available addresses, but I'm really glad to hear that you've gotten great adoption of the platform.