Hi there,
I've just attended a Kenson Seminar and wanted to put forward a few requests/ideas.
1. Storage Manager
I recently downloaded a trial and wanted to add an MSA1000 Storage device into Storage Manager but had 2 issues.
a) Storage Manager did not offer support for the MSA1000
b) I had great difficulty installing the SMI-S provider
My suggestion is that Solarwinds should provide support for older SAN devices. This is because they are normally acquired at great expense to the customers who want to leverage value from the product. In our case, we use the MSA1000 for POC environments but recently lost a lot of servers due to a SAN disk problem. If we'd had the ability to monitor this device then we may have purchased Storage Manager.
With regards to SMI-S Providers, Solarwinds normally try to make it as easy as possible for customers to get their product up and running. If they could wrap up the SMI-S provider as part of a Wizard install then this would certainly make it easier for customers. Either that or you could have an SMI-S diagnostics to suggest fixes for any problems encountered.
2. UDP
The seminar was my first introduction to this product. A presentation was given from a customer at Brunel University and there was the mention of wanting to detect rogue devices. I'm sure that this would be of great benefit to many customers.
Your product has the ability to look out for a device if you specify its name. Whilst this is helpful it relies on the device having been detected in the first place.
I was thinking that you could provide a baselining mechanism for devices e.g. PC's and Printers etc. on the network. Then, instead of alerting on a device name, you could alert on a device name that was not contained within the baseline - a simple SQL query I believe.
3. NPM advanced alerts
This may be something that is already achievable but it revolves around devices that are discovered.
I can setup an alert for high traffic utilisation on one of my core switches and it can tell me the port number on the switch that is affected. However, discovery shows you the device that is actually connected to that port. Is there a way that the alert can let you know the discovered device that is attached? I believe this also would be of great benefit to your customers.
Kind regards,
Paul Kellett
Senior Systems Engineer
London & Quadrant Housing Trust
