I’m not aware of it having probe capabilities - just had that conversation with 
them a month ago.

Their only solution is to stand up additional servers in remote locations and 
have them linked back to the SQL backend …. less than elegant and a licensing 
nightmare


> On Nov 11, 2016, at 11:58 AM, That One Guy /sarcasm 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> solar winds has remote probes. I havent done one yet, im waiting on the sales 
> guy to get back on the restrictions that imposes as far as selling monitoring 
> as a service to contract customers, or even other WISPs.
> 
> Im hoping it functions in a similar fashion to the remote pollers in SNMPc, 
> just a light piece of software you drop on a machine with access to a network 
> that calls home. Unless you have a backup path for the data to get to the 
> server, real time would croak out for that network. I enjoyed it because I 
> could put a poller on my laptop and drop into a network and scan it. I wanted 
> my laptop to get stolen so I could use it as lojac to locate it. 
> 
> There was an option to do a distributed system with snmpc, but there would 
> have been no benefit to a remote poller on the same network as the 
> distributed server.
> 
> We had it set up on a school distrct to monitor their wireless infrastructure 
> between campuses, it was sweet because we had no external access, but 
> therough the remoute poller tunnel (it calls home) we had full snmp 
> read/write access on their network in a secure manner
> 
> On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 10:26 AM, Josh Luthman <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> Xymon FTW!
> 
> 
> Josh Luthman
> Office: 937-552-2340 <tel:937-552-2340>
> Direct: 937-552-2343 <tel:937-552-2343>
> 1100 Wayne St
> Suite 1337
> Troy, OH 45373
> 
> On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 10:43 AM, Josh Reynolds <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> NetXMS *shudder*
> 
> I can just see you sitting there in an argyle sweater sipping tea out of your 
> Windows95 mug - watching your NetXMS updates in the client.
> 
> ;)
> 
> (To be fair, Xymon is WAY older than NetXMS, but it was here decades before I 
> was LOL)
> 
> On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 9:36 AM, Mike Hammett <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> NetXMS does that.
> 
> 
> 
> -----
> Mike Hammett
> Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/>
>  <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL> 
> <https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb> 
> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions> 
> <https://twitter.com/ICSIL>
> Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/>
>  <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix> 
> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange> 
> <https://twitter.com/mdwestix>
> The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/>
>  <https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp>
> 
> 
>  <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg>
> From: "Josh Reynolds" <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
> To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
> Sent: Friday, November 11, 2016 9:35:40 AM
> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] solar winds network bandwidth analyzer pack
> 
> We are still using Xymon in parts of our network simply because it supports 
> proxy collectors.
> 
> On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 9:32 AM, Paul Stewart <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> So that’s one area where Solarwinds falls down in my opinion … there may be 
> workarounds but it’s not ideal for that kind of situation …
> 
> Some NMS solutions have that capability and I hope Solarwinds will develop it 
> at some point as could really use it for some areas of the network as well
> 
> On Nov 11, 2016, at 10:10 AM, Ken Hohhof <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> 
> How well does it accommodate remote probes?  My network isn’t a nice central 
> NOC with backhaul links radiating out, and I need the ability to monitor 
> things like packet loss and latency from multiple points in the network.  
> Also to always have monitoring even if a part of the network gets isolated by 
> multiple failures like during a storm or DDoS.
>  
>   <>
> From: Af [mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>] On 
> Behalf Of Josh Baird
> Sent: Friday, November 11, 2016 8:48 AM
> 
> To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] solar winds network bandwidth analyzer pack
>  
> We use both the Solarwinds suite and Zenoss Enterprise at $realjob (and a few 
> others).
>  
> $30k is cheap for large shops/enterprises.  Enterprise monitoring can get 
> super expensive.  Zenoss Enterprise is usually $100+ per device per year.
>  
> On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 9:38 AM, Paul Stewart <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> LOL … ah yes, Remedy etc ….
>  
> I’m one of the few that actually really likes Remedy …. but with the caveat 
> that I’m not paying for the system and the team of people to actually run it 
> ;)
>  
>  
> On Nov 11, 2016, at 9:36 AM, Josh Reynolds <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>  
> Yes, monitoring can get quite expensive. We have some Solarwinds at $day_job 
> along with HP OpenView, but we're about to roll out a full BMC solution. 
> (TrueSight, etc). We also run Remedy, so you know we are gluttons for 
> punishment.
> 
> We will end up paying more for monitoring this year alone than the average 
> house price in California.
> 
>  
> On Nov 11, 2016 8:32 AM, "Paul Stewart" <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> Well the answer to that question is “it depends” …. I’m a big believer that 
> business is critical on good monitoring (along with good staff, proper 
> procedures etc etc).  Putting a dollar value on Solarwinds specific to your 
> business and it’s needs is difficult as everyone is different ….
>  
> For some people, buying the Windows licenses and a MS SQL backend is a deal 
> breaker right off the bat … for others it’s the actual application costs 
> itself
>  
> SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor SL100 (up to 100 elements) - License 
> with 1st-year Maintenance
> $2895
> SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor SL250 (up to 250 elements) - License 
> with 1st-year Maintenance
> $6495
> SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor SL500 (up to 500 elements) - License 
> with 1st-year Maintenance
> $9995
> SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor SL2000 (up to 2000 elements) - License 
> with 1st-year Maintenance
> $18295
> SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor SLX (unlimited elements-Standard 
> Polling Throughput) - License with 1st-year Maintenance
> $30395
>  
> List price and they always have some “special” on the go .. but that will 
> typically be 10-30% levels on average.
>  
> One might argue that alternative system X, perhaps open source, is “free”.  
> It has no licensing …. but then you have the time factor and possibly support 
> elements of who to call for help should you need it.
>  
> I’m a big fan of open source and Linux solutions ….. not a fan of Windows.  
> But in general, there’s different tools for different needs for different 
> businesses.  For our business needs, Solarwinds was a great fit and we found 
> it friendly on budget - we have SLX version of Network Performance Monitor, 
> additional SLX pollers, SQL Enterprise cluster backend, APM SLX monitors and 
> soon will be deploying NCM SLX for configuration stuff.
>  
> Paul
>  
>  
>  
> On Nov 11, 2016, at 9:11 AM, Ken Hohhof <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>  
> You say price isn’t that bad.  Whenever I’ve looked at anything from 
> Solarwinds, the price has been way out of reach – serious, serious sticker 
> shock.  Did I evaluate incorrectly, or am I just cheap?
>  
>   <>
> From: Af [mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>] On 
> Behalf Of Paul Stewart
> Sent: Friday, November 11, 2016 4:59 AM
> To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] solar winds network bandwidth analyzer pack
>  
> 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] <mailto:[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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 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.

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