Application Monitoring vis Groups or via SAM

No one has replied because what you speak of is a nightmare to manage with SolarWinds for a large company. I could elaborate but its not worth it.

Let us know what you decided to do and how it worked out for you.

Oh I agree whole heartedly...and in typical fashion we are going both ways.   We will  do both Groups and SAM Templates. 

My hopes is the Result of having SAM monitor applications will totally outshine what Groups monitoring is giving  us.  Which is extremely limited as we are only going to have servers as the Group Members, and not any components.

People were afraid of the work involved to build  the templates.  I am trying to explain that applications can be categorized , such as "Case Management Applications"  Which would have a single template that is modified for each specific case management application we have.  We have 30+ Customer's who all may have Case Management Applications of their own.  

Doing it the Group way provides absolutely  no usable data from what I can tell, without massive headaches and on going care and feeding.

Imagine if we could do registry based discoveries and management of services intelligently like that other tool on the market?

Since you cannot do such a thing with SolarWinds, you will have to create a separate template for every server if those services are disparate and the naming varies between servers.

Hi

My esteemed colleague conguir​ has written 2 blog posts, which you may find will help with this.

Automatic Node Population & Application Assignment (Part 1) - Prosperon Networks

https://prosperon.co.uk/blog/web-transaction-monitoring/automatic-node-population-and-application-assignment-2

Mark Roberts

Prosperon - UK SolarWinds Partners

Installation | Consultancy | Training | Licenses

If the desire is to simply understand when something is a problem on a group of nodes, then creating a group with them makes sense. If the goal is to understand when aspects about an application are having issues, that must be accomplished via Application Monitors (via templates). You can take that a step further and add application monitors and nodes to a group, if that fits the need. If you would like to talk more about your specific needs, let me know.

Would you be interested in discussing this more? I'd like to hear your ideas regarding an ideal solution.

I'm always interesting.

The ideal solution is a flexible, granular discovery and management mechanism as seen in other tools.

This is how dynamically managed applications and services should be monitored - dynamic groups based on servers with values obtained from the registry.

With SolarWinds, you have to manually create static groups and templates with no dynamic properties. You cannot target one generic template to one group if there is one deviation in a service name or other piece.

With the other tool, one of my clients has TrackWise deployed with disparate service names across 70 servers for UAT, DEV, PROD. With my dynamic discoveries based on reg keys, I'm able to dynamically manage all of this intelligently. If Joe Admin adds a Trackwise server in Basel, its automagically monitored. Compared to SolarWinds, this is not possible without hoops and hacks and overall trauma. This makes it a massive achey breaky headache to manage when you're dealing with 3000 servers.

Not cranky here, just trying to help you folks make your tools better. It must all be re-written. You guys need to totally re-engineer how app monitoring works with a more intelligent and automated process. The other tool has been able to do this for 12 years. I would love to see it in SW.

I corrected my grammar mistake.

Thanks for the feedback. A dynamic and more intelligent discovery process is something we are working towards, but I think, as you have highlighted in other posts, there is a lot to the Orion platform and it takes some time to get it right.