Phoenix 2020 SWUG Discussion Board

"Can/should I bring my boss/colleague?"

Absolutely.  If I had a nickel for the number of times I've heard someone say "I wish I brought my [boss/co-worker/colleague in other department] to this so they could hear this stuff first-hand," I could retire.  And yes, we totally get it.  The wearing of many hats is the standard for IT professionals. Sometimes getting away from the office can be difficult, but the conversations with attendees, the connections made with staff, and the knowledge gained more than make up for it.

"I'm a ____________.  Would I get anything from attending this SWUG?"

I'm going to take a stab in the dark here, but since you are already on THWACK, you probably use a SolarWinds solution or two.  If you fall into that camp, then I can guarantee that someone else at SWUG would love to speak with you.  Be they attendees using the same products, the product managers wanting to discuss product directions with you, the user experience team to get your usability feedback - we all want to speak with you.  For me, it doesn't matter if your title is Helpdesk Analyst or CIO, hearing from other practitioners will always help you be your best.  If you are still unsure, take a look at the agenda above.  I'm sure you'll find many sessions worthwhile.

Hey Kevin. Since the SDK sessions go up to the 300 level at this SWUG, does that mean there's some kind of "lab" involved?

Sorry achrry1​, no lab, but I will be doing some of the work "live" so expect things to go sideways for me .  I will be making the code samples available and show you how to get most of this working in your own environment.  As great as it would be to provide you with a lab, it doesn't really have any meaning until you can see your data represented.  I encourage you to bring a laptop with VPN and try a few of the read-only things along with me.  I want the hard questions, but even my lab won't have every situation.

Is there any ​one thing you really want out of the API/SDK sessions?

achrry1 What kind stuff do you want to do? What problems do you want to solve? Plenty of us will be interested to dive in.

There are so many things you can do with an API it's hard to limit it to one thing.... At this point, just getting it connected on the backend would be efifng amazing, :-)

One of the biggest draws for me to the API is being able to automate a lot of our CMDB stuff. I know Solarwinds integrates with ServiceNow but there's many, many years of mistakes and duplicates etc that need cleaned up first. Blah, blah, blah...

The other thing that I'd really like to be able to do is tie our Solarwinds instance to a couple of our homegrown apps that some techs use. It's a custom written application that I've been asked if I could have it auto populate with information pulled from Solarwinds.

And I MOST DEFINITELY will have my laptop with VPN access. How else am I going to show you guys the headaches I deal with and get advice on how to solve them?!

Extracting data from the API is pretty much all of what the 101 class is about.  I can see that easily working with your home grown applications.

CMDB is on my list of things to include for the 301 class.  It really falls into the realm of "automation" that I'm trying to get behind.

Kevin is right, and a little effort can make a big difference with something like a CMDB, but make sure you do it right.

NPM data by itself is good, but NCM data for network gear, SAM for Server/App, SRM for storage and VMan for VMware, is even better for the CMDB. I can talk more than people want to hear about this, but for about 4 years I have been working with this stuff and our Service now team where our CMDB lives. Orion does great discovery for stuff, but don't forget relationships too. And on the flip side, you can have non-discoverable stuff maintained once in the CMDB like the support information, then you exports from the CMDB back to Orion custom properties. Once there you get to leverage that for groups, dashboards and alerts.  Once you figure out how to map Orion objects to CMDB elements, get a field in the CMDB for the Orion ID for export and to ease matching later on.

Any MSP Partners out there attending? I want to talk to you!

I'm Kellie in the User Experience Group, I'll be presenting with my pal ccousineau​ on Day 1.  I've been with SolarWinds a long time but am fairly new to MSP.  I want to hear stories--at lunch, over any happy hours!  Come find me!

Wooohooo here we go PHX SWUG 3.0!!!

Phoenix SWUG Do or do not. There is no try.

Phoenix SWUG come you must!

Bill