SolarWinds Discovery and Orion Platform Integration

We are excited to announce that integration between SolarWinds Discovery and the SolarWinds Orion Platform is now available! This new integration allows you to consolidate and gain visibility into IT asset information from the Orion Platform within SolarWinds Service Desk.  

This new integration builds on a previous integration with the Orion Platform, which improved reaction and response times to infrastructure issues by automatically converting Orion alerts into SolarWinds Service Desk incidents and enabling two-way communication between Orion and your Service Desk.

What’s New?

Previously, customers using the Orion Platform could not import Orion asset information into SolarWinds Service Desk, which made it harder to get a complete picture of your IT assets. This visibility is important, as it helps you reduce overspending on IT infrastructure, identify risks, and stay compliant with your software purchases. Moreover, this helps you align Orion asset information with IT service management by automatically populating your Configuration Management Database (CMDB).

Now, the SolarWinds Discovery integration with the Orion Platform enables you to import detailed Orion asset information (i.e. nodes) into SolarWinds Service Desk. This gives you a single repository that provides comprehensive visibility into your IT assets, which helps you make better business decisions on your assets as well as mitigate potential risks.

Furthermore, once imported into your service desk, Orion asset data becomes configuration information (CI) that populates and keeps your CMDB up-to-date. This helps you improve your IT service management processes by giving you a clear understanding of the different parts of your environment, which gives you a complete picture of how your infrastructure impacts the services you provide to employees.
 

You can even accelerate diagnosis and resolution of issues by attaching Orion CIs to SolarWinds Service Desk incidents. This helps you identify the root causes of infrastructure issues since you can add the service management context to CIs from Orion and include this in service desk incidents. For instance, a server with several past outages could be experiencing these outages due to changes that cause the server to go down when they’re rolled out. Adding Change records to an Orion CI and then attaching this information to an incident helps you quickly address the issue. 

Setting It Up

To set up the Discovery and Orion integration:

1. Go to the Setup Menu. Click on ‘+’ and select ‘Orion’.

2. Select the Discovery Scanner and add the connection details for the Orion poller (the main Orion server). 

3. Test the Orion connection and run the Scanner.

Important Notes:

• This integration currently supports the following Orion Platform products:
  • Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
  • Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
  • Server and Application Monitor (SAM)
• A running instance of the Discovery Scanner is also required
• Orion credentials are needed to connect the Scanner to the Orion Platform 
  • An Orion user with read-only permission is preferred and a local user is also recommended 
  • Domain users may not work well 

As we continue to improve SolarWinds Service Desk, we appreciate your feedback. Let us know what you think about these enhancements!