Hosting Orion in AWS

I may have some test info on this soon.  ill be sure to update with any results.

While I don't know what support would say, you may want to hit up Patrick Hubbard - I've seen him do something similar for a lab.

I get approached by SaaS vendors like ThousandEyes to offer to monitor our AWS hosted apps, and there's others in the wings to perform external monitoring.

We watch the gateway addresses from some of our NPM instances but monitoring AWS servers with tools like SolarWinds NPM and SiteScope should be possible if they can be trained to hit the AWS API.

What specifically would you like to monitor or accomplish?

I went back to our network architect and asked this very question.

The response was still ambiguous, but I gather that their desire is to have me price out and install an instance of SolarWinds Orion within the Amazon cloud to monitor servers and apps in the AWS environment.

its impossible. The problem is the database, only run in MS SQL Server.

Our issue with monitoring AWS and Azure hosts remotely is the Windows Agent is garbage. It breaks everyday.

Monitoring the cloud is not an issue, the Windows Agent is the issue. Totally unreliable - which is why it went from being an initially charged for component $ to free. Ya get what ya pay fur.

The Agent was never a paid product, nor was it ever conceived as being a potentially paid product at any additional cost. The Agent has always used native product licensing. E.G. if you monitor a node with the Agent, Orion consumes a 'Node' license. If you monitor a volume, Orion consumes a Volume license. If you monitor a SAM component with the Agent, then a SAM component monitor license is consumed. Etc. Etc.

I won't get too specific, but we have well over a million agents running in the wild today in customer deployments. A not insignificant portion of those agents are running in the cloud, yet the Agent has an exceptionally low support case volume. If you're experiencing issues with the Agent, my recommendation would be to ensure you're running the latest version of your product modules. If you continue to experience issues, please contact support and we would be more than happy to work directly with you to resolve whatever issue you are encountering.

I hate to disagree with an employee I have mucho respecto for, but the agents had a limit of freebies. I remember specifically that they were an additional cost for a number higher than the freebie limit. But I don't need to argue about it with you. I remember when I first had the Agent option, there was a limit of 10 or 20, can't recall exactly. But I know I'm not "mis-remembering'" this. There was a hard limit of free agents in the initial release.

What you appear to be referring to is QoE (Quality of Experience) which for a short period of time was a licensable feature of NPM. QoE used the same agent framework but what customers were paying for was QoE, not the agent itself. The agent has always been a zero cost option, but features you use with the agent may have some licensing impact as I outlined above.