im hoping to curry favor from the list for recent tyrades i may or may not have been involved in
but it really is looking like a cost effective product for a smaller network like ours http://www.solarwinds.com/products/pricing/ is the msrp price sheet if a network is running with some redundant techs and no monitoring solution, 30kmsrp could be justified by tech attrition on the perpetual license for monitoring alone on the redundant license, i dont know about the 6k recurring though for maintenance. Cost can be offset too with user views and remote nodes reselling monitoring as a service. One of the primary drawbacks of running an opensource solution with a non owner admin such as we are (as much of a complainer as I am, I am actually a company man) is that I can spend a good deal of company time learning and building up an awesome open source solution that does all kinds of things with nifty tweaks and whistles, but if i get hit by a car, im the only one who actually knows whats under the hood, which is fine, as long as its working, until its not. We were running snmpc when i transitioned into my role, it was almost fully vanilla so migrating me to management of it was smooth, it would have been smooth even if my predecessor had made an abrupt exit. I learned it on my own time, even had a bootleg of it running here at home. I added in all kinds of neat features, like detailed dependencies to limit cascading alerts, tons of trap based responses, toolsets to pull all kinds of reports, I was even in the process of integrating it with our phone system so techs could call in and have signal readins via a text to voice application.... and then the installation corrupted. My very first experience in "did you have a backup?" no "youre fu**ed" Hard lesson learned, I rebuilt half of it but there was alot I forgot how to do. My first experience in "did you document?" no "youre fu**ed" we didnt renew maintenance and the system got harder to keep running with all the java and other stuff, the remote monitoring revenue was gone and it went to the wayside in lieu of Powercode which ultimately wasnt an NMS The ease of getting this solar winds going and the default monitoring tools really makes it appealing, its still pretty much vanilla and it already saved the day by mistake. If we had it and we lost me because i was in the server room with the offsite backups in hand when the comet hit, other than the 7 hours it takes to get a fresh server 2008 instance updated, the system could be functionally monitoring the network and processing flows in under 2 hours. The atlas maps would take a little more time i would bet. There are a couple dependencies that it tells you about, its a non default iis install, but is has very clear instructions. On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 10:37 PM, Josh Reynolds <[email protected]> wrote: > This is a good writeup on how important proper monitoring tools are, > and on solarwinds. > > Well done Steve. > > On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 10:31 PM, That One Guy /sarcasm > <[email protected]> wrote: > > We are running a demo of this. It started out as an eyeballing a netflow > > collector and analyzer I dont have to poke all the time. we started > > scrutinizer, liked it, but found out the price scale killed any chance of > > getting it approved > > > > the pricing for this wasnt as bad, and the sales guy has some incentives, > > but the whole package was alot, and I didnt intend on even looking at the > > monitoring side because port based pricing models can quickly get out of > > hand > > > > as part of the initial configuration i seeded the auto discovery just to > get > > through the setup. in the mean time, some other stuff came up and i i got > > busy, this was friday or thursday > > > > we have been having some intermittent issues with periodic slowness to > some > > customers, the symptoms were that of a bottleneck. We had to throw some > > static routes into our OSPF network defeating dynamics to force traffic > out > > one connection, thinking maybe it was a saturated lower quality > upstream, no > > noteable relief. so we thought maybe we were saturating a backhaul that > was > > getting to high percentage utilization, we added a redundancy and further > > split traffic up with static routes. no joy. it was at a point where the > > next step was just going site by site auditing every device...fun since > the > > issue was intermittent, that means multiple times > > > > the sales guy wanted me to commit to getting this thing up and running by > > this weekend so next week we could list out what we want from it and how > we > > achieve it, or if we cant do it. > > > > so yesterday i go to turn on the flows and send them to the server, the > > weird slowness is going on so its irritating me. > > > > i decided to clear out the alarms from installation and low and behold > > theres an alarm on a named interface of one of the routers i tossed in on > > discovery saying 90 percent or more usage. this is a 366mb licensed link > on > > a gigabit interface, so im quite curious. I drill into the detail, the > port > > is running at 100mb and saturating, i flap the port and its back to > gigabit. > > > > we only monitor with powercode currently, we have snmpc but its old and > shut > > off. Ive toyed with a whole bunch of other opensource and low cost > systems > > but never had enough time to actually drill down and learn them, i did > just > > get a book on nagios because it was cheap on ebay. > > > > powercode is worthless for any amount of invasive alerting or monitoring > at > > any detail, if i want ports identified other than by port number it > requires > > an individual probe. pita. its good for long term static monitoring and > some > > real time tools, but its not an NMS. > > > > the point here, is the solarwinds tool is sweet, and for the 100 > interface > > package with a promotion the cost is doable if one takes into account the > > time investment of the other opensource platforms, installation, learning > > curve, back end configuration, and plethora of gotchas. > > > > this particular issue could have cost us a good deal in man hours tracing > > it, refunds to customers for service impacts, and potential long term > loss > > of customers. > > > > now, once i knew where the issue was, i knew exactly where to look in our > > existing data to verify it. 20/20 hindsight doesnt mean those are the > > toolsets that would have been picked out first. if this tool had been in > > production use, we would have known the first time the link negotiated > down, > > and addressed it before there was any noteable service impact. > > > > > > If you are very frugal in your interface selection, this can be a good > > choice for an nms (i havent played with the atlas map other than dropping > > some stuff on it) if you dont want to dick around with a diy solution. > its > > cheaper if you dont add the netflow analyzer package. Its solar winds so > its > > pretty, and user friendly. the flow analyzer does route monitoring too, i > > havent looked at that, but the salesguy says he thinks we can visualize > our > > ospf with the network atlas component, if thats the case the boss will > > likely drop cash. licensing is perpetual with 20% yearly for maintenance > if > > you want it > > > > > > > > http://www.solarwinds.com/network-bandwidth-analyzer-pack > > > > > > -- > > If you only see yourself as part of the team but you don't see your team > as > > part of yourself you have already failed as part of the team. > -- If you only see yourself as part of the team but you don't see your team as part of yourself you have already failed as part of the team.
