A whole host of issues I have with NPM

Just from a longtime user perspective it is very customizable.  But it is done through layers.  Everything is built off of views (every page) and all views have resources on them.  The resources can be filtered in almost anyway.

For example I made a view for my night operators that shows JUST my 5 largest sites.  This was done by putting the "all nodes" resource on my view and filtering that resource by name with the 5 sites.

I would suggest hitting up your sales rep to assist you getting the info you need or finding the people to get it to you.

The way that I get around this is to create a new summary page that has all that you want on it and assign that as the home page in the account manager for which ever account you want to see that.

hkor

Your post heading indicates that you are having a lot of problems with the Orion software but after reading your post, most of your frustrations seem to center around the graphs, is this correct?  Are there other problems that you are also experiencing that you have not mentioned?

I would also be curious to know which product(s) you are coming from so I have an idea of what kind of features and capabilities you are used to having available.

We just recently moved to Orion and in the product selection process we reviewed about a dozen products and what we came to realize is that every product has it's warts, you just need to find a product that best fits your needs.

I (and I am sure many others here in Thwack) would like to be able to help you with Orion in any way that we can.  If you could maybe let us know what your environment looks like and what you were hoping to do with Orion we will likely be able to help.

So, I have a few suggestions.  I'm not sure if they are specifically what you are looking for but they have solved similar issues for my installation.

1) Including a specific node/volume/interface graph on a summary page. 

I do this by adding a custom html resource on the summary page and then inserting an iframe referencing the specific graph I'm looking for.  To get exactly what you want, go to the chart that most resmbles what you want and customize the timeframe/frequency/size etc and then view the printable version.  Use the URL it sends you to as the iframe source and you should be set.  (I can go into more detail if necessary)  You should be able to get several of your items this way

2) Network wide total bytes transfered

Use the same procedure above but this time after customizing your graph (total bytes transfered) for your timeframe and sampling interval, you can select "chart data" at the bottom of the customization screen.  This will output the graphical information as text.  You can include this as an iframe on a summary page as well.

3) Reports as a resource

Any report can be used a resource on summary pages.  There is a resource that allows you to do this.  You just have to modify the report you want (or make a copy if you don't want to modify the included report) and then include it as a resource.

Hopefully this helps.  Let me know how it goes.

Thanks to the community for chiming in to share solutions. Way to go guys.

M

I have been asked what environment I am coming from. Cacti is the polling system I was using before.

After another entire day of messing with Orion I can say I am still less impressed with it's "customizations"

I was able to display my pix outside interface graph per the suggestion of making it into an iframe however I find it a very cumbersome and ugly workaround. NPM should support this kind of functionality naively.

I was also able to get the average disk space report onto my network summary page via creating an entire new report in the report editor program. While I am amazed at the level of control the report editor has I am turned off by the fact pretty much 99% of orions customizations have to be down outside of the web interface. Whats the point of that?

I'd also like to point out that all my terabyte volumes are being reported incorrectly inside orion. I have a 5.45TB RAID50 volume being monitored and orion keeps reporting the total size as 5.999TB with 740GB free. However the operating system of the node reports that the actual size is 5.45TB with only 638GB free. Any help on that one?

hkor

First to address the incorrect volume size problem.  I am guessing that this device uses NetSNMP and if that is the case this is a reported bug with NetSNMP reporting the information incorrectly, Orion is just getting it's information from there.  I am well aware of this problem because the people that make OpenNMS opened the bug report with NetSNMP because of a problem I was having with OpenNMS doing the same thing.  If you are not using NetSNMP then I don't know what the problem could be here.

As far as graphing data is concerned, you have the UnDP (Universal Device Poller) that you can use to setup custom SNMP data collections and then present that data in Orion as well are run reports and set thresholds against it.  Have you had an opportunity to play with that yet?

I am familiar with Cacti, it uses RRD and that kind of graphing functionality is a feature request that has been submitted to SolarWinds via the following thread...

Hope some of this helps!

It sounds to me that you may be in the process of evaluating NMS systems, if this is the case the best advice I can give you (after having just done the same thing) is evaluate several solutions from different providers so that you can see how they all compare and select the one that works best for you.

We have found Orion to have a very large feature set at a very resonable price, the APM (Application Performance Monitor) is a great module for using your own scrips to monitor stuff as well as tons of Out Of The Box components for monitoring all sorts of different applications.  We actually plan to use the APM to get around the issue with NetSNMP reporting disk space incorrectly on large volume sizes.

I'm not using NetSNMP. I am using the default SNMP agent installed with Windows Server 2003 R2.

I'm not using NetSNMP. I am using the default SNMP agent installed with Windows Server 2003 R2.

That is interesting, sounds like the Windows SNMP Agent may have a similar problem with large volumes.  We don't have any Windows systems with drives that big so I wouldn't have seen this problem.  It would be interesting to grab that data with a different application, my guess is that it would still be inaccurate.  All Orion does is grab the SNMP data and store it in the DB so the numbers you are seeing are the numbers that Orion received from the SNMP agent (at least that is how it was explained to me and my experiences have supported that).