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Hot Standby functionality

Would anyone be able to tell me how the Hot Standby feature works? I'm evaluating the Orion product and consider resiliency important.  As I understand it, a Hot Standby client can take over polling if the primary (or any) poller fails, but what about alerts and traps FROM devices? Given routers are configured to send traps / logs to specific IP's, does that mean you set all of your devices to send traps / syslogs to all of your pollers? And if so, do these guys just discard the traps when they are not the primary poller or do they all write the traps to the database? Am I making any sense at all?

 Cheers

  • FormerMember
    0 FormerMember
    what about alerts and traps FROM devices
     

    The Hot Standby Engine backs up SNMP polling.  Listener services like syslog and traps can't be backed up in the same way.   If ensuring continuity for syslogs and traps (and possibly NetFlow), the solution many customers use is to direct those services to a second IP address and purchase a second Orion for complete redundancy.  Please talk to your Sales Rep and Sales Engineer about how that would work technically and in terms of cost.



  • what about alerts and traps FROM devices
     

    The Hot Standby Engine backs up SNMP polling.  Listener services like syslog and traps can't be backed up in the same way.   If ensuring continuity for syslogs and traps (and possibly NetFlow), the solution many customers use is to direct those services to a second IP address and purchase a second Orion for complete redundancy.  Please talk to your Sales Rep and Sales Engineer about how that would work technically and in terms of cost.



    Denny, I just wanted to verity that the Hot Standby still does not back up the SNMP Trap and Syslog Listener services, is that correct?

  • FormerMember
    0 FormerMember in reply to byrona

    Denny, I just wanted to verity that the Hot Standby still does not back up the SNMP Trap and Syslog Listener services, is that correct?

     

    Correct.

  • We use the Hot Standby install, and direct our traps/syslog to both the primary and secondary. The issue with directing those to two servers is the trap/syslog server are both live on the primary and secondary servers at all times (ie. they don't back each other up) so you get duplicate entries in the db for all your syslog/traps.

     

    Our solution was to have the primary syslog/trap servers configured w/ your regular alerting, and configure the backup server to simply log everything to a flat file (we rotate this file every day). This way when the primary server dies(totally), you'll still have a text file w/ searchable information, although alerting won't work correctly while only using the backup. Plus it provides two methods of access to the information in the event your db is down for whatever reason.

    Hope that helps!



  • Our solution was to have the primary syslog/trap servers configured w/ your regular alerting, and configure the backup server to simply log everything to a flat file (we rotate this file every day). This way when the primary server dies(totally), you'll still have a text file w/ searchable information, although alerting won't work correctly while only using the backup. Plus it provides two methods of access to the information in the event your db is down for whatever reason.

    I like this solution; could you be a bit more specific on what exactly you are doing and how you are doing it?

    Based on they way you explain this I am assuming that you are using some other tool than NPM on the backup server to put the logs in a file, is that correct?  If so what are you using and how are you doing that?

  • You could front end by a load balancer.  Replicate web site info and use standby pollers as well.  Then all syslog and traps would only go to the active host.