Solarwinds is interesting software… I’m now on week #4 of “renovating” our Solarwinds deployment…. updating, cleaning stuff up, better automation, better alerting etc etc
i’m a Linux guy … really like open source. But for network monitoring I have yet to find an NMS (even commercial) that I actually liked in Linux. it seems strange just saying that as there’s a lot of great TOOLS in Linux but for a full blown NMS that’s where I have my issue. Right now, we run multiple tools on Linux such as Nagios, Cacti, Observium, Collectd, Munin to name a few …. and then we have Solarwinds. All of these systems are disconnected from one another, so a conscious effort has been underway to “standardize’ everything under one platform - and this is Solarwinds. I have been a long time user of their platform - and generally like it quite a bit. I wish it didn’t run under Windows and I wish the performance of the system was better …. also wish they would integrate some of their other products into the “common platform” that they have acquired. Also, the price isn’t that bad (that will vary with company size, importance of use etc) and it’s a good system that doesn’t take a huge amount of time to manage/maintain once it’s operational. For their net flow product in particular, depending on number of interfaces and flows, make sure you size the database accordingly…. it’s very hungry for resources in that regard. > On Nov 10, 2016, at 11:31 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 > <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.
