For many us starting out with Solarwinds, we are not sure where to start, what should I do, where do I go, and how do I do "Solarwinds". Trust me, I have been there and sometime when I work with a new product or have touched one in a while, I have to hunt for the information I need. Well, I have developed this page as a Starting Point for All Starting Points. The intentions is to provide general direction for those new to Solarwinds.
As I find more helpful posts for my use, I will reference them here. Please follow&bookmark this page, if this would be a helpful resource for you.
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For Beginners: New to Solarwinds and not sure where to start.
Contribution of the Year 2016: Monitoring 101 by adatole
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If you are new to Solarwinds and have not already done so here is the link for the on-boarding mission. This is a great tutorial on how to use the site and score yourself some excellent Thwack Points! This mission will take you about 15 minutes.
You Don't Know Thwack - Onboarding Mission
Getting Started with Evaluations for Solarwinds Orion Products
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This was submitted by ashley.heilbronn@lr.org on this thread Just starting as solarwinds admin and Im looking for some solarwinds best practices... HELP!. I liked it so much and thought it was a great starting point for new folks that I wanted to include it on the Welcome to Solarwinds........... . If you found this piece helpful please LIKE it and mark it as HELPFUL.
Here are some best practices I've learned for myself, i've looked after 2 solarwinds instances over the past 5 years, one was at a Refinery, Mine and Port where i was a network sys admin,it was just a one man show and my current gig .
- Create your own dashboard and views with some stuff that is relative to you? I've added the show last 25 audit logs as the 1st thing I see, I like to know who is access SW and where from (IP Address).
- Create a organize grouping structure for your nodes you are monitoring that works for your role, my company has a global presence about 190 offices or so, so my group nesting looks like this Company > Region > Country > City > Office > Office RTR > Office LAN
- Dynamic queries for groups, learn how to define dynamic queries to help automate the population of groups.
- Setup your dependency for your groups, like in my nesting above, if my RTR group goes down than than my LAN group is unreachable which tells the polling, hey back off on the polling on the LAN infrastructure, till it becomes reachable again, and reduce the load on the poller.
- Custom Properties, I've only just started using these bad boys and whole cow, these are very helpful in a lot ways, one such way is converting a inventory listing about our circuit providers for our office routers, which means i can build very flexible alerting schemes.
- If you have SAMs as apart of your build, deploy all the solarwinds application monitors to your monitoring environment, and monitor of every aspect of your build, IIS insight, SQL insight for database server, QoE Server sensors for solarwinds servers and database, vmware polling for database server and solarwinds server, EVERYTHING!!, it gives you very deep understanding how everything works with each other and you can mature with the appstack approach.
- don't be afraid to try new things is the most important thing, get a virtual environment setup with SW with virtual box and GNS3 on a machine with decent CPU and RAM and run wild with it.
- set up meetings with stakeholders and ask the question how can the monitoring/reporting help you?
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For Intermediates: Been around as a user/viewer but would like to know and do more.
Solarwinds Labs - One Stop Shop
SolarWinds Certified Professional Launch
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Hardware/Virtualware:
Server Hardware/Virtualware Requirements for Solarwinds Servers
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Interesting Threads
INFRA-AS-CODE: How do we start? - Good Change Management Process
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If you are ready for some more fun stuff, try these out:
How to do various customizations with your Solarwinds
Everything DISA STIGs for your Network
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Top 10 Thwackers Content:
In the Presence of aLTeReGo..... by aLTeReGo
Learning and Understanding by mcbridea
Customizing your Solarwinds Orion - NPM by wluther
Network Configuration Manager - Configuration Change Templates and Things by goodzhere
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