Orion Product Team blog

Hey Chart, get in my Report! (Part 1)

chris.lapoint — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:00:00 GMT

That was an old Austin Powers reference for those who missed it ;-) So, what do I mean by this? Well, a question we get asked all the time by customers is “How do I get the pretty charts I see on my Orion website into a report that I can send to my boss on a regular basis to make him/her happy?”. Seems like a reasonable request, right? But, before I dive into this topic, you’ll need to ask yourself what types of reports does your boss care about seeing? Does she want the charts as well as the detailed data behind the charts? Or, would she be perfectly happy with the Orion website pages she’s seen while looking over your shoulder?

Let’s start with the latter use-case since it’s the simplest and requires only a few steps in Orion Report Scheduler.

How to send an existing Orion website page as a scheduled HTML email to your boss:

To begin, you’ll need to open the Report Scheduler app on your Orion server (Start > All Programs > SolarWinds Orion > Alerting, Reporting, and Mapping > Orion Report Scheduler). Click the Add+ button to create a new report job. You’ll see the following screen where you’ll want to fill in the job name and click Continue.

On the next screen, you’ll see a prompt to add a link to a Web Report or Page in Orion.

Rather than try to find this URL manually, simply click on the ‘…’ button and you’ll see a browser pop up where you can navigate to the Orion website page you want. In this example, I’d like to send the “Top 10 List” page so I’ve logged in and navigated to that page below.

When you click the “Use Current URL” button, this will automatically populate the previous screen as you can see below. Notice that I’ve also checked the “Retrieve a Printable Version of this Page” option. This will remove the banner and the menu bar from the page. BTW, if you’re like me and you can’t stand to wait, try adding “&printable=true” to the URL in Orion to see what the page will look like when it’s sent.

When I click “Continue”, you’ll see I can set up my schedule. In this case, I’m going to send it every morning at 8am. You can also schedule it to be sent weekly, monthly, or just this once.

Finally, you’ll need to enter the email address of the folks you want to send it to. If you want the email to actually go anywhere ;-), make sure to also fill out field on the “Email From” and “SMTP Server” tabs.

Click “Continue” one more time, enter the Windows credentials you want this job to run under (use a service account whose password doesn’t change often), and then you’re done! You should see your new job listed in the Report Scheduler window. If you want to run it now to test, simply right-click and select “Run Selected Job Now”. Just be aware that if it works, your boss will be getting the email each time you run the job!

NOTE: Some of you may have issues with your email server gobbling graphics in HTML pages. If you can’t work around this, fear not because we’ve got a solution in the works. As noted on this post, we’re working on enhancing Report Scheduler to allow you to send Orion pages and reports as PDF email attachments in addition to HTML.

Ok, but what about first use-case? That is, the management team that wants their charts and their detailed table-based data too? Well, you have a couple of options in Orion to address that need. It’s a little more involved so I’ll talk you through that in part 2 of this series.

In the meantime, have a great weekend and please let me know in your comments if there’s anything else you’d like covered in part 2!

Are You My Server? APM’s Application Discovery Process Explained

denny.lecompte — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:04:00 GMT

Science and engineering types like to know things. Knowing feels good, even when it lacks practical application. It feels even better when it is practical. With this axiom in mind, this post will explain Orion APM’s Application Discovery process.

In the discovery wizard, you select a group of servers first:

Next, you select a set of application templates.

With the servers and application templates chosen, you provide a set of credentials that should work on the target servers. I guess you could try credentials that you don’t expect to work, but that seems pointless. Still, to each his own.

APM takes these three sets of data and conducts its discovery. It considers each server in turn. It will take the first server, the first set of credentials and the first application template and test the template against this server to see if there is a match. What determines whether there is a match? Under Advanced Scan Settings, there are four settings

Minimal Match = at least 1 component in the template works on the target node

Partial Match = at least 35 percent of the components in the templates work on the target node

Strong Match = at least 65 percent of the components in the templates work on the target node

Exact Match = all of the components in the templates work on the target node

To be complete, we compute percentage as (number of successful components)/(total number of components), where success is a component in the Up, Warning, or Critical states.

Here’s the full discovery process as a flowchart:

So what can you do with this info? One takeaway is that the discovery process is serial. If you pick a large number of servers, a larger number of application templates, and a lot of different credentials, the process will take unnecessarily long. Use Domain Admin credentials, or similarly broad credentials, if you have them. Furthermore, break your servers into groups such as Windows, Linux, Unix. Break them down further if you have have naming schemes that tell you which servers are running apps such as Exchange. There are different Exchange templates for different roles, and the discovery process will automatically sort that out.

That’s a fairly complete explanation of how the application discovery process works, but please post questions if there’s more you want to know.

Technorati Tags: APM,discovery,application templates

Are you afraid of the dark?

bshopp — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:00:29 GMT

Alright, so I don’t mean afraid of the dark meaning no lights on in the room. What I do mean is being in the dark if the server Orion is on fails due to a hard drive or OS failure (for example) and you have no visibility into monitoring your network.

What do you do if this happens? Sleep sound, my dear friend, we’ve got your covered with the new SolarWinds Orion Failover Engine. The Failover Engine -- or FoE for short -- will monitor and protect Orion, including all of the installed modules, additional pollers and even EOC if you have this. As you can see in the below marketecture graphic, you can monitor and protect all of your Orion machines.

Let me take you on a feature tour of FoE. The FoE client, which can be run from the Orion server or loaded on your desktop, allows you to configure failover settings and monitor the current status of all your FoE installations.

The FoE monitors all of the SolarWinds Orion services, including the IIS web server on both the primary and secondary Orion servers. Based on your preferences for each service you can define the behavior of what happens if a service stops/fails. This allows you to define some self-healing behavior into the FoE instead of just doing a flat out failover. For example, say the Orion Information Service stops. Since this is the first time, let’s go ahead and re-start the service. Hmm, nope that didn’t work, it won’t start and stopped again, maybe there is a dependency on one of the Orion services, so let’s go ahead and re-start the entire Orion application. OK, the service didn’t start that time either, something must be wrong, lets go ahead and initiate a failover to the secondary server.

The Orion FoE doesn’t just monitor the services, it also monitors key OS, server and web server statistics and just like above, you can define the behavior on first, second and third event. For example, if the server hard drive space gets to 15%, then send an email to user A. If it gets to 10%, then email user B. If it gets down to 5%, then initiate a failover to the secondary server.

The Orion FoE also has a built in alerting engine, independent of the Orion alerting infrastructure, which will notify you on any key statistic or event occurring with the FoE or the details it is monitoring.

Let’s get into more of the specifics here on some of the details going on in the back end. The FoE can support multiple hardware deployment configurations:

Physical to Physical
Physical to Virtual
Virtual to Virtual

Once you get Orion installed and setup, the FoE will create a clone of key critical configuration, registry and file system parameters which get restored to the secondary server. Once that initial setup is complete, a set of real-time file and registry filters as you can see below, replicate any file system and registry changes to the secondary. This way you secondary Orion server is always up to date with what is going on within the primary Orion server.

Let’s walk through the specifics of how it works in a high availability scenario using the below diagram as our guide.

The Orion primary and secondary servers are located within the same subnet and share the same identity including IP Address. Since two identical IP’s cannot be on the network at the same time, a packet filter is installed on the secondary public NIC so it is not broadcasting or receiving traffic. A second NIC exists between the two servers which handles the heartbeat and real-time data replication between the primary and secondary.

When a failover condition occurs the following sequence of events occurs:

the remaining Orion services on the Primary Orion server that are still running are shut down
the packet filter is removed off the secondary NIC and the Orion services are started on the secondary server and the secondary server is now the active server
the primary Orion server which is now down is now the passive server and if the server is still online, a packet filter is placed on its primary NIC

Your downtime is minimized to the time it takes for the server failover to initiate and the services to start on the secondary Orion server. The other beautiful thing here as well, since both servers have the same IP Address, is you do not have to reconfigure your network to send any Syslog, SNMP Traps or Netflow traffic to a new IP Address.

This is just one specific use case that the Orion Failover Engine can handle. In another post I will walk through additional use cases and scenarios.

If you need more information, please check out the product page here and you can request a demo from one of our SE’s by emailing your sales rep or clicking here.

Adding Profiler Views to Orion

bmrad — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:44:00 GMT

A lot of you are asking when Profiler and Orion are going to be integrated, and while I don’t have a date, you can see What We Are Working On. In the meantime, if you just have to have some Profiler goodness inside Orion, here is a way to do it. This is several steps long, and we are working to improve this process. I am assuming you are somewhat familiar with Orion navigation.

NOTE: While this gets Profiler views into Orion, it is far from a perfect user experience. A few caveats:

You have to log into Profiler in the same browser as Orion before these views will work
Occasionally you will break out of the Orion view into a new window or tab
There is no integrated navigation or breadcrumbs, drill downs in Profiler are generally one way.

Build a View:
In general, any Profiler view (summary, monitor, device) could be imported into Orion. However, we would recommend summary or monitor views, as they allow you to drill down to device views.

Go to Settings > Views > Manage Views
Click Add, then enter a name of the view (ex: Profiler Summary), choose Summary for Type Of View and click Submit.
Change the number of columns to 1, and width to 1000, click Submit.
Next to the Resources box, click the plus sign to add a new resource.
In the tree, open Miscellaneous folder and check Custom HTML, press Submit.
Press the Preview button at the bottom, this will take you to the view with one resource with no data.
Press Edit and change the title name to Profiler Main Console.
We will be using an iframe to connect show Profiler within a container on the screen. In this example, the link is to the Profiler Main Console, but at the end of the post I will give you some more sample URLs from Profiler.
Enter the following into the text Box:
<iframe src="http://<ProfilerServerNameOrIP>:<ProfilerServerPort>/MainConsole.do?actionName=showConsole" height= 400 width =950 name="text" id="contentFrame"></iframe>
where:
   src is the URL to Profiler
   ProfilerServerNameOrIP - the Profiler server's DNS name or IP address
   ProfilerServerPort - the port
   height is the height of the iframe
   width is the width of the iframe, generally you want this to be less than the width of the resource defined in Step 3.
   name and id are very important, make sure you copy them in there
When you are done, it should look like the image below. Press Submit.

If everything is correct, and you have already logged into Profiler in another tab, you should see something like this. Otherwise, you will see a Profiler login screen.
NOTE: Once you are successful, copy the URL of this page - you need it for the next step.

Add the new View to the list of Available items:
The view you built above is not available to be added to the menu bar until you manually add it.

Settings > Customize > Customize Menu Bars
Edit any menu bar (ex: Default Menu Bar).
Scroll all the way to the bottom of the list of Available items, click Add.
Enter a name, paste in the URL from the last step from above, and uncheck "Open a New Window", and press OK.
You should see Profiler Summary in the Available Items.

Add the new View to a Menu Bar:
You can now add any of the Profiler view you created to any existing tabs, just like any other view...

Settings > Customize > Customize Menu Bars
Edit any menu bar (ex: Default Menu Bar).
Drag and drop the new View to the menu bar, reorder as you see fit.
Press Submit under the selected items.
Next time the page refreshes, you should see the new View (Profiler Server) in the Tab.

Phew… I worked up a sweat, did you? When integration comes, all the heavy lifting will be done, so you won't have to do it.

As always, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please let us know.

Use Cases and sample URL:

Summarize Profiler Data - show high level view of storage and virtualization
<iframe src="http://1.2.3.4:9000/MainConsole.do?actionName=showConsole" height= 400 width =950 name="text" id="contentFrame"></iframe>
Monitor Profiler events - Show Profiler event monitor in Orion
<iframe src="http://1.2.3.4:9000/EventMonitor.do?actionName=main" height=700 width =1100 name="text" id="contentFrame"></iframe>
Monitor Virtual and Physical server status
<iframe src="http://1.2.3.4:9000/ServerMonitor.do?actionName=main" height=500 width =1100 name="text" id="contentFrame"></iframe>
Run Profiler reports in Orion
<iframe src="http://1.2.3.4:9000/ReportList.do?actionName=listReports&reportListState=2" height= 400 width =950 name="text" id="contentFrame"></iframe>
Summarize your Virtual Infratructure
<iframe src="http://1.2.3.4:9000/VCConsoleServlet?state=vmware" height=500 width =1100 name="text" id="contentFrame"></iframe>
View a particular device - you must know Profiler's internal DeviceId
<iframe src="http://1.2.3.4:9000/ConsoleHostFrameServlet?DeviceId=1" height=500 width =1100 name="text" id="contentFrame"></iframe>

To build more, right click any link in profiler and copy it to a text file for review.

Request for feedback – multiple interfaces and UnDP on charts

bshopp — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:54:10 GMT

In this prior blog post I outlined how you could put multiple elements in the same graph using the Universal Device Poller. We have been having conversations with many of you on thwack about wanting to expand this to support additional use cases. Based on that, I wanted to go ahead and do a post and give you a sneak preview into something we are working on. Just as in our “What we are working on” posts, I cannot commit to any dates or releases, but I would love to get your feedback on the use cases and some of the mock ups we have put together on this.

So the first set of use cases we are looking to do are the following:

Chart an interface from one or more nodes

this also includes the ability to display as a sum/aggregate

Chart multiple interfaces from a single node
Chart a single UnDP which is assigned to many nodes
Chart a single UnDP which is assigned to many interfaces

I will walk through the user flow of how this would work for multiple interfaces on the same device

Add a new multi-element graph resource to a node details view
Select which interfaces you wish to add to the chart
Tweak the parameters of the view. For example, do you want to show all interfaces individually or as a sum?
Submit and those interfaces will be rendered on the same chart

So what do you think? Are there features or use cases not covered here?

Expanding Toolset Right Click Integration

mavturner — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:40:00 GMT

Have you ever right clicked a node and seen a list of tools drop down? Most of us have been trained never to right click on a website. In most instances, this is correct, however, we’ve provided a great way for you to interact with nodes without cluttering up the interface by using the right click functionality.

This is the current Toolset and Orion integration. It allows you to quickly launch relevant troubleshooting tools directly from the web interface. If you have Toolset installed on your local machine and access the Orion web console, you will see the right click integration. This integration is supported in IE as well as Firefox!

Here’s what it looks like:

There are several great tools here but what if you want to add your own application to the list? No problem! This blog post was motivated by this thwack forum, SSH in right click menu.

For example, say we are having problems with an application and want to understand what is happening by using Wireshark. By the way, if you don’t know what Wireshark (formerly Ethereal) is, go to their website now.

Find the SWToolset.MenuOptions file on your local machine. We recommend you backup your existing file first, then add the following text to the file between the <MenuOptions> and </MenuOptions> tags.

<MenuOption Order=”28” ID=”1028” Visible="TRUE" Title="Wireshark" BeginGroup="FALSE" HasSubMenu="FALSE" ExecString="C:\Program Files\Wireshark\wireshark.exe –i 1 –k –f "host {TARGET}"" Icon="" Extra="" Parent="" Required="4"/>

The Order and ID values will depend on the other values in the file, the ones I provided were the first available and should work for you. To break down the Wireshark parameters, –i indicates the interface index (in my case it is 1), –k means to start capturing immediately, and –f is the capture filter (in this case, “host {TARGET}” where {TARGET} is replaced with the IP Address of the device automatically when you right click in NPM). For more information on Wireshark Capture Filters, see the Wireshark Wiki. Obviously, this will only show you traffic that your machine can see. To configure port spanning on Cisco devices, refer to these resources from Cisco.

For other applications, simply replace the Title value and ExecString with appropriate values. Also, the Orion Admin Guide has a great write up of how to accomplish this in the “Adding Programs to a Toolset Integration Menu” section. You can find all of our documentation at http://thwack.com/support.

Saving the above changes and re-launching the right click integration menu should result in the newly updated menu.

You can post to this blog to brag about what cool and useful tools you launch from the Toolset menu! If you don’t have the Toolset, click here for more information and go try it for free!

What’s in Orion IPAM 1.7?

macnugetz — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 22:52:00 GMT

Orion IPAM 1.7 is right around the corner, which has a couple of really cool features we want to tell you about. First, as usual, you asked for it, so you shall receive: Cisco DHCP. Yes, now you can add Cisco DHCP servers and their corresponding scopes to IPAM. Let’s take a look. You’ll add a Cisco DHCP server in the same way you add Microsoft DHCP servers.

From the DHCP Scope Monitoring tab, select ‘Add New,’ then ‘DHCP Server.’ From here you’ll be given a list of devices.

From this list it’s easiest to sort by Vendor, then expand the list of devices under Cisco. Here, we’re going to add Tok-2621.aus.lab, which is one the Cisco DHCP servers in our lab. The next step will be to provide credentials for the DHCP server. See screenshot below.

For Cisco DHCP servers, you’ll select ‘CLI Credential’ (vs. Windows). You can use an existing set of credentials, or you can create new credentials. Here we’ve created a new set of credentials for Tok-2621.aus.lab. We’ve specified Telnet as the protocol on Port 23, and we’ve successfully tested our credentials against the DHCP server, and IPAM found seven scopes on the server. Once credentials have been added, click ‘Add DHCP’ at the bottom of the page. You should now be able to see this server on the DHCP Scope Monitoring tab.

Here we can see the server has been added, and IPAM is actively looking for scopes. Once added, the scopes will appear under the Scopes subtab above.

The next feature we want to highlight is something we call Indirect Discovery. If ICMP and/or SNMP is disabled on a particular subnet, IPAM can’t get an accurate status on the IPs in that subnet; however, Indirect Discovery solves that problem. Indirect Discovery works by specifying a ‘neighbor’ device that has up to date ARP tables, which gives IPAM an accurate status on the IPs in that subnet. Let’s take a look at how to configure Indirect Discovery in IPAM.

From the Manage Subnets & IP Addresses tab, select a subnet then click Properties. This will open up the Edit Subnet Properties dialogue in the screenshot below.

Here you’ll notice a new section titled ‘Neighbor Scanning.’ In this section you’ll specify the IP address of a neighbor device (in other words, a high traffic device on the subnet), and the scan interval. In the scenario where ICMP and/or SNMP is blocked on that subnet, IPAM should now get an accurate status on the IPs in that subnet.

As I stated at the beginning of the post, IPAM 1.7 will be out very, very soon. We hope you like the new features (you specifically asked for them!); let us know what you think.

Orion Customer Training Part 2, Session

denny.lecompte — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:40:00 GMT

We had a lot of folks click through the last training announcement, so we thought we’d use the blog to make sure folks know about Part 2. If you missed Part 1, we recorded it, so watch whenever you have time.

We’re going to do Part 2 on Thursday, August 19 at 11:00 A.M., CDT. Register Now.

What are we going to cover?

Customizing and building reports
Advanced uses for network maps
Tuning the Orion polling engine
Building fault tolerance

Will the training be recorded?
Yes, all of our training sessions are recorded and posted to SolarWinds.com for on-demand playback. We’ll e-mail a link to everyone that registers.

How much is the training?
It’s free to all SolarWinds customers with active maintenance agreements.

Can I forward this to my friends/coworkers?
Yes, forward it on to as many as SolarWinds end-users as you’d like.

If I can’t make this class, will there be others in the future?
Yes, we’ll be sending out announcements for future sessions as they’re scheduled.

Edit, August 23rd: Now that the event has passed, you can see the recording here.

__________________________________________________

Shameless Marketing

__________________________________________________

Like a spoiler alert in a movie review, if you don’t want to see any marketing, stop reading now. On the other hand, if you’re considering buying any Orion modules, you might want to read this. For the rest of the month, we have significant discounts on all Orion modules, including IP Address Manager and IP SLA Manager. Our product titles are pretty self-descriptive, so you can imagine that IP Address Manager helps you to manage your IP Addresses. If you’re still using a spreadsheet, do yourself a favor and take a look. Likewise, IP SLA Manager leverages Cisco’s IP SLA technology. If your network has more than one physical location, IP SLA lets you collect network quality stats on critical protocols (e.g., VoIP, DHCP, DNS, FTP, HTTP) from the perspectives of any or all of your different offices. We wouldn’t have built these modules if we didn’t think they were useful for our typical customer. For more info on the discounts, contact Sales at 866.530.8100 or sales@solarwinds.com

When I Upgraded to NPM SP1 - IE 8 Started Complaining & How to Get Rid of Other IE 8 Errors

christineb — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:50:00 GMT

Here's the scenario: you use IE8 with https. You use NPM 10 and upgrade to SP1. Then, IE starts complaining in a message like the one below:

We have heard reports that some customers are seeing this alert on every single page as they navigate through the Orion website. Ugh, we're sorry. So there's good news and bad news. We'll give you the bad news first: we don't have a permanent fix for this yet, but we're working on it. But wait - we have some really good news too. So, the good news is - we know what causes this and we're going to fix it. It has to do with the optional Toolset integration. Additionally, the problem is more annoying than anything else. There's no real danger or underlying issue you need to worry about. But wait - there's still more good news: we also have a workaround. First, you can use Firefox or another browser. That solves the problem in that this is just IE specific. You can also disable Toolset integration by going to Settings->Account Manager -> Select your Account (admin) -> Change the option for “Allow Browser Integration” to No.

We're working to fix this issue in a more permanent way - so stay tuned!

Other IE 8 Issues You Might See

While we're on the topic - we know that IE 8 will also give you all this error even if you don't have HTTPS configured:

If you add the site to the Local Sites in IE, then you get the option to download SWToolset.exe.

However, even if you install, you will still be prompted to download and install every time you go to a new page. If you disable Toolset integration, or use a different browser, the ActiveX control is not run and this is not a problem. Also, you can manually register it per the instructions in this thwack post.

Orion NTA – What we’re working on…

chris.lapoint — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:10:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Orion NTA 3.7 RC!! We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback in the RC forum and we’ll be going GA very (very) shortly, so stay tuned!

So, with 3.7 virtually out the door, it’s time to turn our attention to what’s next, and as you might expect, there’s already a lot of research and planning activity underway. I’ve included a list of features/enhancements below that we’re currently considering for the next release. Please remember to check back on this post over the next few months as there will likely be changes as we complete our planning cycle and move into development. If there are things you expected to see that aren’t on the list, please let us know!

Scalability and performance
- We’ve made significant improvements in this area over the past couple of releases and our goal is to continue on this path
Expansion of traffic analysis capabilities
- Provide endpoint-centric (non-NetFlow source) versions of Top XX Conversations, Top XX Applications, and Top XX Protocols resources for placement on node details views. E.g. Place Top XX Conversations on APM server view to see conversations to/from that server.
- Huawei NetStream support
- BGP AS support
- More out-of-the-box reports
Visualization and usability
- Allow users to create a filtered network-wide summary view versus having to choose a particular source device and interface(s)
- Allow users to leverage filtered network-wide summary view as results from search (versus having to choose specific endpoints/hosts and then adjust timeframes to see data)
- Allow Traffic View Builder views to be easily saved for quick access at a later time
- Enable grouping and filtering of nodes and interfaces in the NetFlow Sources resource similar to the All Nodes resource
Start backend work on IPv6
- As noted in our IPv6 roadmap post, our goal is to continue working towards IPv6 support across our product line. We won’t get there all in one release, so this is the first phase.

PLEASE NOTE: We are working on these items based on this priority order, but this is NOT a commitment that all of these enhancements will make the next release. We are also working on a number of other smaller features in parallel. If you have comments or questions on any of these items (e.g., how would it work?) or would like to be included in a preview demo, please let us know!

Hidden Gem: The Custom HTML Resource

macnugetz — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 23:04:00 GMT

We recently received a comment to one of our previous blog posts requesting the ability to display static information in Orion that may be relevant to a device. For example, let’s say you wanted to display specific information about a site or an office, like geographical location, site name, etc. This is possible today using one of Orion’s hidden gems: the custom HTML resource.

First, you’d probably want to create a new view. On this view, you’d add whatever resources are important to you, including the custom html resource. See screenshot below.

Here I’ve created a custom view called ‘Custom Foo View.’ Next, I’m going to add the custom HTML resource to this view. Click the ‘+’ button on whichever column you want to add the resource, then you’ll be given a list of resources from which you can select.

The custom html resource is under the Miscellaneous category. Select it and click ‘Done.’ Now, let’s take a look at the view we’ve created that includes the custom html resource.

Here we can see our new Foo view with the custom HTML resource displayed; however, it’s empty. To add content to the resource, simply click ‘Edit.’

Simply paste HTML into the text box. In this case, we’ll add some HTML that gives us some basic information about one of our sites.

That’s it! This is but one of the many ways you can use this resource; we’d love to hear about some of the other creative ways you’re using the custom HTML resource.

Profiler - What we are working on...

bmrad — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:07:00 GMT

Now that Profiler 4.12 is out, we have turned our attention to 5.0, which is focused on providing the same features and value Profiler delivers today, but in an Orion friendly way. Some of the items we are working on:

Integrated Install - You will be able to install Profiler onto any Orion standalone product
Single Sign On - Logging into Orion allows you to link into Profiler Views and data
Storage, Virtualization and Files - Profiler’s great capabilities and data will still be available in 5.0
Orion Views and Resources - Profiler will present some data in native Orion ways
New Name - last but not least, Profiler will become part of the family with a new name: Orion Storage Manager 5.0.

OK, integration isn't always the most exciting story (even though this will be some great stuff), here's a sneak peek on what will be working on post 5.0.

Orion Storage Views - Views for Arrays, Raid Groups and LUNs, with Orion style resources and drill downs
Enhanced Thin Provisioning Support - adding more data, reports and alerts for more storage arrays
End-to-End Visualization - show a visualization of each data path, with drill downs to associated paths.
Add more devices - add the storage devices our users are demanding

PLEASE NOTE: We are working on these items based on this priority order, but this is NOT a commitment that all of these enhancements will make the next release. We are working on a number of other smaller features in parallel. If you have comments or questions on any of these items (e.g. how would it work?) or would like to be included in a preview demo, please let us know!

Brian

Free Online Orion NPM Customer Training

denny.lecompte — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:27:00 GMT

One of the great benefits of Orion is that its really easy to install and easy to use. Nevertheless, new customers often find that they can get more out of the product if they invest a little time in training. Notice that I say time and not money, because SolarWinds offers quite a bit of online training for free. Here are a couple of useful resources for getting more out of what you’ve already bought.

First, we’ve got a training session that’s already been recorded. Just click on the link below and start watching.

NPM Customer Training Part 1 (90 minutes)

During this 90 minute training session we’ll cover:
Optimizing hardware configurations for Orion
Understanding Orion’s architecture
Installation, discovery, and base configuration
Leveraging the information that Orion provides

Part 1 video is here

This class was designed for existing users of Orion NPM. The training is presented by Josh Stephens (Head Geek and VP of Technology), Chris LaPoint (Group Product Manager, Network products) and Brandon Shopp (Product Manager for NPM).

Part 2 of the training hasn’t occurred yet (as of July 29, 2010). You can sign up to attend the sessions live and ask questions. Still free! Sign up soon, because we can only handle 1000 folks in a session. If we fill our sessions, we’ll schedule more. We will also send you a link to the on-demand version as soon as it is available.

Level 2- Orion NPM 10 Customer Training" (120 minutes)

Using the Advanced Alert Engine
Customizing and building reports
Advanced uses for network maps
Customization of the Orion web console
Tuning the Orion polling engine

Thursday, August 12, 2010 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM CDT, GTW Part 2 Session 1: Click here to register for session 1
Thursday, August 19, 2010, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM CDT, GTW Part 2 session 2 : Click here to register for session 2

Graphing multiple data points on a single graph with the UnDP

bshopp — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:44:56 GMT

Technorati Tags: SolarWinds,SolarWinds Orion NPM,SolarWinds Orion,Universal Device Poller

Some of you may already be familiar with this feature, but for those of you that are not, this is a handy little gem. We often hear requests for the ability to put multiple data points on to a single chart/graph and while we have this on our list of items to make easier and more robust in the product going forward, you can accomplish this today on a single node leveraging the Universal Device Poller (UnDP). For those of you not familiar with the UnDP, check out this tutorial here for more info.

A couple examples of what you may want to do with this are graphing utilization of multi-core CPU’s or looking at multiple interface utilization. I have put example screenshots of both of these below.

Ex. Multi-Core CPU Utilization

Ex. Multiple interface utilization

Now, we’ll get to the details on how to accomplish this with Orion. You can do in 9.5 and 10.0.

Remote Desktop to your Orion server and launch the Universal Device Poller application and create a new Universal Device Poller
Specify the MIB or OID you wish to poll. Note this only works with polling a table
Assign to the nodes you want to poll this information from
Select where you want this data to appear, most likely this is going to be as a chart on the node details page
Log into the Orion web console and navigate to one of the nodes you assigned the Universal Device Poller to and click Edit in the upper right hand corner of the resource
Within the edit dialog you can modify multiple parameters to you preference including:

A more user friendly resource title name
Which items from the table you want to be graphed on this chart
Select the chart format of how you wish it to be displayed within the graph
Time period and sample period for the chart graph

Enjoy!

Here is another example of the same above interface utilization chart, but as a line chart instead of a bar chart.

Also, here are some of the OID’s we use to gather some of the more common statistic in Orion which you may find useful here.

Windows CPU & Memory:

hrProcessorLoad 1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3.3.1.2.
hrMemorySize 1.3.6.1.2.1.25.2.2.0
hrSWRunPerfMem 1.3.6.1.2.1.25.5.1.1.2.

Interface Errors and Discards:

ifInDiscards 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.13.
ifInErrors 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.14.
ifOutDiscards 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.19.
ifOutErrors 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.20.

Interface Bandwidth:

32bit Counter based

ifInOctets 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.10.
ifInUcastPkts 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.11.
ifInNUcastPkts 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.12.
ifOutOctets 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.16.
ifOutUcastPkts 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.17.
ifOutNUcastPkts 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.18.

64bit Counter based

ifHCInOctets 1.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.6.
ifHCInUcastPkts 1.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.7.
ifHCInMulticastPkts 1.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.8.
ifHCOutOctets 1.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.10.
ifHCOutUcastPkts 1.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.11.
ifHCOutMulticastPkts 1.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.12.

Managing your Cisco IP SLA Operations with Tag and Owner Fields

mavturner — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:11:00 GMT

When you have several IP SLA operations, you may need a way to organize them quickly. The tag and owner fields allow you to input custom parameters that can then be used to track your IP SLA operations. This is an advanced feature and if you have configured it, IP SLA Manager will discover these parameters when you do an operation discovery.

To configure tag and owner for an existing operation, enter these commands at the enable prompt

In this example, I used operation number 2000. The operation number will vary depending on your configuration. To find the IP SLA operation number and other useful information about your IP SLA operations, type:

show ip sla monitor configuration

at the router prompt. Note: these commands are valid on IOS 12.4. Earlier versions used the rtr command where the tag and owner parameters are not available.

The tag and owner field can include any text data. For more information on how to configure IP SLA operations, I highly recommend Cisco’s user guide.

If you want a step by step walk through of manually creating operations from someone other than Cisco or SolarWinds, Brad Reese at NetworkWorld has a good write up on creating a TCP Connect operation.

After you have the tag and/or owner field on the operation, when you do an IP SLA discovery with IP SLA Manager, the tag and owner will be added. You can then filter by these in the Manage Operations screen by right clicking on the field.

If you don’t see the tag or owner field try scrolling to the right more :-) But if you still don’t see it, you may need to add it. To add a field, simply right click on one of the existing fields (Operation Name, Type, Source, Target, etc). Next, click Columns and select which fields you want to be displayed in the Manage IP SLA Operations screen.

I hope you find the tag and owner field helpful. This feature was specifically added in based on feedback from our users during the Release Candidate phase. We know we haven’t done everything requested but we definitely value your feedback and try to help where we can :-)

If you aren’t using the Orion IP SLA Manager, click here for more information. IP SLA Manager can be used to automatically create and monitor Cisco IP SLA operations to give you more information about your WAN health and your VoIP environment.