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  • A Series of Unfortunate Events: Using Orion’s Syslog Server to Monitor VMware Events

    In network management, events are bad news.  At least the ones you care about are.  You can spend your whole day sifting through various informational events, but most of the ones that need your attention are telling that something is wrong.  Most network systems share their events through Syslog, and it’s generally understood that monitoring those Syslog streams is a best practice.  Based on the conversations that our PM team has had with users of VMware, it’s much less widely known that you can monitor VMware events using Syslog.  VMware host servers support sending their...
    Posted to Orion Product Team blog by denny.lecompte on Fri, Mar 12 2010
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  • Evolution, Justice, and the Art of Being a Geek

    I've mentioned it before, but The Big Bang Theory is one of my absolute favorite TV shows and if you're a geek like me you really ought to check it out sometime. Spoiler alert - if you watch the show I'm just about to discuss this week's...
    Posted to Geek Speak Blog by Josh Stephens on Thu, Mar 11 2010

  • Easily adding double and triple gauges for Universal Device Pollers

    Technorati Tags: SolarWinds , Orion , Orion NPM , Universal Device Poller , SolarWinds Orion NPM I ran across another cool post that a member of the thwack community put together that I wanted to share with everyone.  lasher put together some new resources for Orion NPM v9.5.1 which allow you to create double and triple gauges within a resource for Universal Device Pollers.  If you wanted to accomplish this today, you would need to use a custom html resource, so this makes life much quicker and easier. So I can hear you saying, ok you had me at double and triple gauges, how do I get this...
    Posted to Orion Product Team blog by bshopp on Tue, Mar 9 2010

  • Community works! - A simpler way to manage Orion email alerts

    First of all, mad props to byrona for sharing this tip with the community. I know there’s a lot of you already using this simplified email alert management trick, but I wanted to make sure to spread the word just in case. Here’s how it works. Instead...
    Posted to Orion Product Team blog by chris.lapoint on Thu, Mar 4 2010
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  • It's time dude, cut the cord already...

    Some things really are a matter of opinion. My buddy Greg Newman prefers spinnerbaits while I prefer to fish with plastic worms. My brother Zach prefers to shoot a pump gun while I shoot an over/under. And apparently my friend and fellow-blogger Michael Morisy over at Tech Target prefers to waste his money on less secure,old school wired networks than to step into the 21st century and join the wireless fan club... You can read all about his take on this subject here . Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of places where wired networks are the only logical choice and I don't need to detail...
    Posted to Geek Speak Blog by Josh Stephens on Thu, Mar 4 2010
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  • Windows Credentials and Microsoft DHCP Servers in Orion IPAM

    We get many, many questions on thwack regarding Windows credentials for adding a Windows DHCP server to IPAM.  There are few tips and tricks I will share that can make this process relatively painless.  First, let me explain why you need to...
    Posted to Orion Product Team blog by macnugetz on Tue, Mar 2 2010
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  • Different Views for Different Devices

    One of the most appealing things about Orion is the ability to drill-down from high-level info into details.  You see something green or red on the screen, you click on it, you go to a view that has more details about the thing you clicked on.  It’s powerful yet simple.  That simplicity of interaction comes from a sophisticated object model.  Users almost always start at a Summary view.  Summary views typically show everything across the managed network—e.g., all nodes, or all applications, or all network interfaces.  If you click on a node from a summary view, you...
    Posted to Orion Product Team blog by denny.lecompte on Thu, Feb 25 2010
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  • Understanding When to Deploy a Distributed Network Management Architecture

    Here at SolarWinds we offer a product called EOC - or Enterprise Operations Console. EOC is used when you want to deploy Orion in a distributed management architecture. Today I received a question about when you should think about deploying such an architecture...
    Posted to Geek Speak Blog by Josh Stephens on Thu, Feb 25 2010

  • Audible Alerts in NPM - aka - Wow - I didn't know it could do that!

    Did you know that NPM offers audible alerts? It sure does - and they are super easy to set up. You may find yourself wondering - now why in the world would I need that? Well, you might find yourself work, work, working away and be completely oblivious when an alert appears in another window - or on another monitor. But, if you had sound - a customizable sound - then that would definitely help grab your attention. (When you think customizable sound - think any .wav file you like.) You might also worry that adding sound to alerts would really make a lot of racket in your workplace - no worries -...
    Posted to Orion Product Team blog by christineb on Wed, Feb 24 2010
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  • Understanding the difference between NetFlow and IP SLA

    One of the most common things I'm asked to explain is the difference between Cisco IP SLA and NetFlow. At a glance, they have a lot in common: They're both supported on many Cisco devices (routers, swithes, firewalls, etc) They both can help you...
    Posted to Geek Speak Blog by Josh Stephens on Mon, Feb 22 2010

  • CBQoS and NetFlow aren’t peanut butter and jelly for you?

    We believe that CBQoS and NetFlow go together like peanut butter and jelly, but several of you commented that it was frustrating that you had to enable NetFlow on the interface to drill down to see CBQoS data. Who are we to dictate how you like your CBQoS? Well, the good news is with Orion NTA 3.6 you can have it any way you like it. If you’ve upgraded to NTA 3.6, you’ll notice there are now two LAST RECEIVED columns in the NetFlow Sources resource: As long as one of the LAST RECEIVED columns has a date/time stamp, then drill down is enabled and you can navigate to the respective interface details...
    Posted to Orion Product Team blog by chris.lapoint on Thu, Feb 18 2010

  • New look... Same great stuff!

    New thwack home page You might have noticed that the thwack home page is new today! We have added more content items and have made it a single click to get to your posts! What do you think?
    Posted to Weekly Update by Dawn_L on Tue, Feb 16 2010

  • I just got a tweet my network is down

      Technorati Tags: SolarWinds , SolarWinds Orion NPM , SolarWinds Orion , twitter , network alerts As much as I wish I could take credit for this, I can’t.  ljenkins figured this out and posted it to thwack a few months back, which the inner geek in me thought was pretty dang cool, so I wanted to blog about it. Orion can send you an email or page when a network event occurs, but what about using twitter as a medium to distribute your network alerts and events?  Obviously you would not want to expose this to the entire twitterverse (which according to urban dictionary is a real word...
    Posted to Orion Product Team blog by bshopp on Tue, Feb 16 2010

  • Analyzing Web Traffic

    One of the most difficult aspects of analyzing network traffic is that so much of today's network traffic is web traffic riding on either port 80 (HTTP) or port 443 (HTTPS). When you analyze network traffic using a technology like NetFlow, sFlow,...
    Posted to Geek Speak Blog by Josh Stephens on Thu, Feb 11 2010

  • How Does Orion Mark a Node as Down?

    This is a very common question we get.  What’s going on behind the scenes when a node goes into warning status, or when it’s actually down?  Well, it all starts with a simple ping.  Orion pings its nodes at regular intervals to determine the status of those nodes.  When Orion gets a response, everything is cool and the node is green.  What happens when Orion doesn’t get a response?  When that happens, we can’t immediately assume the node is down, as there are a number of other reasons why the node may not be responding other than it being down.  In other words...
    Posted to Orion Product Team blog by macnugetz on Thu, Feb 11 2010
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SolarWinds is rewriting the rules for how companies manage their networks. Guided by a global community of network engineers, SolarWinds develops simple and powerful network management software and network monitoring software for networks of all sizes. SolarWinds also offers a network certification program to become a SolarWinds Certified Professional (SCP).

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