Best Practices for New Users

Hi 

Have you or any of your team set up or used SolarWinds before? Are you currently using SolarWinds? What exactly do you want to do and also what is it that you want to monitor? Do you want reports, monitor traffic, severs, network equipment, wifi? SolarWinds has many products and add ins. 

My suggestion is that you look at what you want/need and read all the technical pdf's that are available on here. Use THWACK to ask questions. Get as much info first. 

Regards

It's a good challenge to set up a monitoring platform for an environment of that size.  Make sure you review the architecture and scalability docs and don't try to skimp out on your database server, that's by far the most important part of the infra.

Once you get your system installed I think the first order of business is figuring out your custom properties.  Don't be fooled, there is no way to manage Orion at scale without using them. 

I always deal with requests by assuming nothing is ever a one-off, if I do something for one case I'm going to need to figure out a way to make that flexible enough to handle many cases.  Just as an example sometimes people create a bunch of true/false properties when it would be more practical to have a single property with a drop down pick list.

As you get comfortable with your environment and pin down all the custom properties you'll eventually get sick of doing things by hand in the GUI the slow way.  By that point you are going to want to get familiar with SQL and SWQL and the Orion API.  You'll end up saving yourself huge amounts of time and make it a lot easier to enforce standards and make sure things aren't broken or slipping between the cracks.