Intro to SWQL Studio

Greetings! And welcome to the second in our series of primers on customising the Orion Platform. Today’s post will focus on first installing and then navigating through SWQL Studio. This free utility is simple to use, but can drastically lower the barrier to creating and editing SWQL queries.

Help Resources

Before we go any further, it’s worth highlighting two key resources for using the SDK.

• The GitHub
• And the THWACK

The GitHub site is the main resource, where you can download the installer, browse code samples, and review the schema and wiki for the SDK itself. It’s also where issues are tracked, so if you do find a bug you can flag it as an issue there.

The other main resource is the Orion SDK forum here on THWACK. SolarWinds does not provide pre- or post-sales support on any customisations, including code using the Orion SDK. However, that does not mean you are alone. You can often find code samples that may address your use case by simply searching the forum. And the site is also frequented by not just SolarWinds staff and THWACK MVPs, but other users who can also provide feedback and guidance on code that you may be working on.

Installing SWQL Studio

SWQL Studio is a Windows-based utility, and is included with the Orion SDK. The installation is simple. Just navigate to the “releases” area of the GitHub site (https://github.com/solarwinds/OrionSDK/releases) and download and install “OrionSDK.msi” on your Windows workstation.

Once installed, connect it to your Orion server (of course, you will be working on your special dev server).

Navigating through SWQL Studio

The connection itself is made to SWIS on the server (the same Information Service covered in the previous post). By accessing via SWIS, instead of SWQL itself:

• Separate logins to the actual SQL database itself are not needed
• Account limitations are still applied
• Any changes to the database schema are abstracted from the user

Once connected, you will see the server you connected to, as well the credentials you used, and if you expand on this connection icon, you will see the various data sources represented. Note, the list of objects will vary depending on the modules installed and the versions of those modules.

To the right of the object list you will see an editor screen. From here, you can type in SWQL, and execute the query to see the results. Running the query is very simple:

• You can click Query-> Execute in the menu
• Or simply hit F5 or Ctrl-E

In the below example, I typed out a simple query. We will talk more in the next post about how to write queries. I just want to draw your attention to the fact that in this latest version of SWQL Studio (2.3.0.123), autocompletion is also possible.

A lot of the power of SWQL Studio however, lies in the fact that the necessary data can be viewed graphically.

Let’s expand on the Orion item in the list:

Then scroll down to Orion.Nodes, where we will see the resource referenced in the hand-written SWQL statement I used previously. If I expand this resources I will then see all of the properties of this Orion.Nodes object, two of which I had referenced in the aforementioned SWQL statement (caption, and IP_Address).

A key difference between SQL and SWQL is that there is no equivalent to select* in SWQL. However, just by right-clicking on the entity within SWQL studio, you can “Generate Select Statement,” which will populate the editor window, with all the fields populated.

Another useful aspect is the ability to identify the property type by its icon. To explain a bit further, let’s refer to Orion.Syslog as an example.

First up, we have the keys, which are indicated by the golden key icon. These are essentially the unique IDs used to reference each individual record in the data source.

The most common properties are the standard fields, indicated as blue rectangular prisms:

Whereas properties that are inherited are display as green cubes:

A very interesting aspect here is that related entities (depicted with the chain icon below) are also shown here. That means you can see which of these can be used to implicitly join data, without having to write an explicit join.

And as a final point, verbs (represented as pink prisms) that can be used in scripts are listed here, as well the parameters needed for each verb. We will cover this very cool feature in a future post.

Wrap Up

  Now that we have taken a solid look at SWQL studio, you should be in an excellent position to dive in and look at the data available within Orion, for use in reports and scripts. Not only does it allow you to easily create SWQL that you can use for various purposes, it also allows you to parse the entities within the database, including related objects.  With the next post, we will actually work with SWQL queries, and some of the constructs that differentiate SWQL from SQL. And in follow-up posts, we will see how the verbs can be used to provide management capabilities from