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Solarwinds for the Nagios Administrator?

FormerMember
FormerMember

Our company has been using Nagios XI for a long time and we're slowly working to move over to SolarWinds now that we have purchased it. The networking team is happy because of the additional checks that they can configure, but SAM seems more complicated for us server folks. Does any documentation exist that is aimed at former Nagios users? Specifically a few things I'm looking for:

* How do I create groups and organize servers into groups?

* How do I configure certain checks to run against a group?

* How do I configure checks on a group to notify a certain mailbox/pagerduty?

My understanding is that SAM allows you to leverage existing NRPE checks into SolarWinds as well, is that true? What about the Nagios performance data graphing, is there something similar to that in SolarWinds?

  • Mark covered a lot of the key bits you asked for there but I wanted to chime in with some comments on the transition from Nagios to Orion.  If you have a deep background in Nagios then you will probably need to rethink your approach to a lot of things when it comes to using Orion.  Especially when it comes to alerting and groups.  Orion uses their "groups" for an entirely different purpose than what you would be doing in Nagios and, for reasons that may be complicated to explain to a new user, they have a performance penalty that can really jam you up in a large environment.  You will be MUCH better server by using custom properties to tag your servers and use those properties to organize things and filter which alerts apply to which objects.  Some common properties you will likely end up needing would be a property to track the applications on a server(AD/Exchange/oracle/etc), one for the environment (dev/test/prod/etc), a property with the distribution list who should be notified regarding system issues (see https://thwack.solarwinds.com/docs/DOC-177456 ), and you might also need properties for the applications monitors themselves because orion treats app monitors as more of their own object, not just a child object of the server they are assigned to. 

    I point this out because I have had to do several remediations with former nagios admins who try to apply their nagios centric though process to Orion and had trouble.  The tools have some fundamental differences of approach and doing a 1 to 1 transfer of your old schem to the new tool will not get you where you want to be.

    -Marc Netterfield

        Loop1 Systems: SolarWinds Training and Professional Services

  • FormerMember
    0 FormerMember in reply to mesverrum

    That's very helpful information. Is it possible to set those custom properties when registering a node? The less manual tweaking I have to do and the more I can do through Chef, the better.

  • If you are doing discovery in the gui no, but using the api yes.

  • FormerMember
    0 FormerMember in reply to mark_wiggans

    With regards to Nagios Monitors, this seems like I have to configure an SSH account for it to run the check, is that correct? I'm not sure why that would be necessary given that it's already running the SolarWinds agent (and NSClient++/NRPE, but I didn't expect it to leverage them).

  • FormerMember
    0 FormerMember

    So my thought after digesting all this would be to create a local script on the SolarWinds server that would execute check_nrpe with the appropriate data for the check. I'm just not sure if that would have the performance data for graphing, though.