I love Orion and I am doing something in it daily so I was very surprised when we had a network outage today and we didn't get any alerts ... at least, not right away. It turns out a separate tool incorrectly detected a power outage and started issuing shutdown requests to my servers. Had this been an actual outage, that would have been great but what we discovered is that the Exchange server and the BES (blackberry) server were two of the first to be shut down. This meant that we had no way to know that there was an issue. If this had happened in the middle of the night it would have been especially bad.
I wanted to suggest a version of Orion that would monitor a handful (2-4 max) of nodes that I could install and run at an off-site location. That way, if my Orion server were to go down, or if I lost connectivity to the Exchange or the BES servers, the tiny-Orion could use other methods to alert me to the issue.
I know SolarWinds has a backup poller option but the our environment can't yet justify that cost. But we would definitely make use of a tiny alternative.
