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Assistance req: NOC view for SAM & NPM

Good afternoon,

I'll preface this with the fact that I'm pretty new to SolarWinds as a whole. So far, I've been able to manage alerts (make new ones, update old ones etc.) and work with custom properties pretty alright.

Here's the version banner from the bottom of the page:

Orion Platform 2015.1.2, SAM 6.2.1, DPA 9.2.0, QoE 2.0, NPM 11.5.2, IVIM 2.1.0

This week, I've been struggling with setting up a decent NOC view. As we have NPM and SAM, I was hoping to get one view setup to monitor some top metrics from both systems. Our NPM lives on one server (call it server A) and SAM on another (call it server B).

Working within SAM, I've setup a NOC View. On there, adding the columns from the available SAM selections is a piece of cake. I feel that I have a good grasp on getting SAM information presented.

The difficulty I am having is getting information from NPM now. The only way I've have limited success is by taking the page source from the Top 10 view in NPM, and pasting that into a "Custom HTML" resource on the NOC View. This kind of works - the page does load, but then the entire NOC view is filled with "There was an error while rendering resource with id <id>", where <id> is variable.

Poking around at it, I got the page basically back to where the SAM information is not throwing that rendering error. The NPM "Custom HTML" resource still is.

I'm at the point where I'm pretty convinced that there must be a better/easier way to tackle this problem. I looked around on google and a couple of threads on thwack, but nothing has been very helpful. In fact, a KB from SolarWinds says to use Custom HTML for this exact purpose... though their example does not even work.

So, instead of kicking myself over and over again, I thought I'd step back and ask the smart folks here for some assistance. I hope I included enough information here, but if not, let me know and I'll clarify or provide any that is needed. Thank you!

Edit: Just to summarize - I am attempting to get the Top 10 view from NPM to display in a NOC view created in SAM. If I try iframe, I get an error ("this content cannot be displayed in a frame"). If I pull the ASPX and dump it in the Custom HTML, it causes issues, likely due to CSS/JS references (if I had to venture a guess, anyway).

  • I wish I knew the answer on this one as it would help me too. Maybe someone from SWI can respond?

  • Well, I had a little bit more success Friday afternoon and this morning.

    Within IIS, I set the "X-Frame-Options" in the HTTP Response Headers to "ALLOWALL". This allowed me to insert the NPM pages as Frames in the SAM NOC View I have established.

    But it looks pretty bad, as one would expect. Since you're just basically loading the entire page in that single frame, you get the all of the tabs, links, images etc that clutter it up pretty badly.

    SO, what I'm trying to do now is just insert each piece of information I want as iframes. For example, I'm trying to make two iframes - one will display top 10 Node by Current Response Time, and another to show Top 10 Interface by % Utilization.

    It's working, kind of. I simply open the desired Top 10 list in NPM, then copy the URL to the iframe. It displays the information, but it's still pretty cluttered. I wish I could find documentation so I could put, say, the top 5 nodes instead of top 10, and also exclude the title banner, since it just gets repeated in the table as well (I'll have "Top XX Nodes by Current Response Time" in large font at the top of the iframe, then "Top 15 Nodes by Current Response Time" in smaller font at the top of the table within the same iframe).

    So, I continue on. Kind of aggravating that it's not clearly documented in any of the manuals or guides.

  • Why are they on two different servers?   You should get much easier and complete integration by putting them on a single server.   If your instance is big enough to not be able to poll both on the one server, that would be solved by getting an additional polling engine (APE) not splitting the servers up...

  • cnorborg‌ is correct. Both SAM and NPM should be installed on the same server using the same database for this to work as seamlessly as you expect. The only other alternative is to use the Enterprise Operations Console.

  • I was waiting for someone to come in and mention that. emoticons_happy.png

    I do not know the history of why it was built this way. Additionally, I have been unsuccessful in finding if/how it would be possible to merge the two together. From what I have read here on thwack, it's not possible to merge two instances. Losing the historical information is not acceptable.

  • That is correct. You cannot merge two instances together. What I would do is install SAM onto the NPM server or vise versa and slowly begin the migration process. The historical data will eventually age out of the old server while the new server will have been collecting for some period of time. The older server would remain accessible for historical reference and reporting until all items are migrated to the new server and all data has aged out of the system. That's how I'd do it if I was in that situation. The alternative is to do as you were doing with the custom HTML resources, probably passing the username and password in the URL or using a direct access account to automatically log into the 2nd instance if Windows Authentication isn't being used. 

  • While I see (and agree with) merging the two instances, it's a bit of a political landmine. I'll broach the subject, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was going to be 6 or 12 months before I can get the OK to even start.


    If I could get by on custom HTML, that'd be fine for now. The "Top 10" view is most of the way there, I just need to figure out how I can make it look decent. I'm not a programmer at all, but I was hoping I could just do some timple HTML to get what I need. Down the line, getting the instances combined would be nice, just difficult to get off the ground.

  • From what I understand though, the EOC won't give you everything that having both on the same server will.   You'd still be limited in the full scope of what is possible.   I've never used it myself, can anyone confirm this?

  • EOC is focused on providing summarization of data across multiple Orion instances. You can check it out yourself at the link below.

    http://eocdemo.solarwinds.com/

  • I think it was this discussion that led me to that belief...

    EOC Still seriously lagging behind