Hi,
Any news on the status of a SolarWinds Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) component since Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, abandoned SNMP for Exchange, SQL etc.?
Thanks,
Craig
We'll be coming out with a WMI poller in early 2008.
Denny LeCompte Sr. Product Manager, Orion SolarWinds Austin, TX
Based on preliminary glimpses it may not be exactly what you are asking for. At present there doesn't not appear to be any method of collecting PerfMon counters, which is what most people are talking about when they ask for WMI support.
Now this is based on a demonstration or a very early development version of the product which might not reflect the final product, but from what I was able to observe the WMI support Denny says will be available in early 2008 appears to be limited to process monitoring. Similar to what the SNMP Application Monitor does now just via WMI.
I hope that helps
More generic WMI polling will probably be later in the year.
Denny is right. We're exploring the addition of more generic WMI polling later in the year. For those interested in WMI polling, what are the drivers for getting this data? How would you use this data in your job? For example, are your network infrastructure management responsibilities being extended to include more application/server monitoring (that require WMI statistics)? Is the request for WMI coming from the server folks?
Chris LaPoint Sr. Product Manager NCM (Cirrus), ipMonitor, LANsurveyor SolarWinds Austin, TX
We have various VBScripts that utilize WMI to interact with file transfers and such. I'm currently monitoring for the wscript.exe processes, which is okay to some extent. However, a WMI event would be better, instead of getting an alarm for each wscript service going up and down.
As a smaller shop, our network admins have to work hand-in-hand with our server admins. Having one tool to monitor everything makes life much easier, even if the tasks are distributed based on job duties.
When management asks the team for uptime reports they want application availability stats as well as infrastructure stats. This gives us a broader view of actual uptime for the services we're providing. It makes sense to me: if the network is sound but an Exchange service halts we are still down as far as our users are concerned.
So, ultimately, the request is coming from management but we all tend to support the idea.
I see a huge plus with WMI polling for Cisco Call Manager. almost every imagineable statistic is reachable using WMI (number of phones registered, number of active calls, number of gateways registered, etc). Being able to trend on this and set alerts for the sudden disappearance of say 25 registered phones, seeing a gatway unregister, or being able to trend actual calls both over the PSTN and between call manager locations would be extremely useful.
-DW
I suspect that the Call Manager stats via WMI will only apply to version 4.x of Call Manager. The 5.x versions have abandoned the Windows based platform architecture.
Dave.
I believe that version 5.x was offered in both the appliance model (unix) and the application model (windows). I do think that version 6.x is slotted to be only Unix. Regardless, there will be a large number of 4.x and even 3.x CCM installations within enterprises for several years to come. We have 7 or 8 clusters and almost all of them are 4.x or below.
We were interested in a broader access to WMI data via APM for monitoring our web and database servers. We had hoped to be able to track more detailed information than just availability info for specific processes. Ideally, we would have a central system for alerting us of any form of issue that could impact service delivery, be the issue a bouncing switch port, or a database that is suffering from timeouts, blocking, or disk I/O problems. The key is a central point of collection, and we'd be happy to have Orion and APM serve as that source.
PhilipLee:We were interested in a broader access to WMI data via APM for monitoring our web and database servers. We had hoped to be able to track more detailed information than just availability info for specific processes. Ideally, we would have a central system for alerting us of any form of issue that could impact service delivery, be the issue a bouncing switch port, or a database that is suffering from timeouts, blocking, or disk I/O problems. The key is a central point of collection, and we'd be happy to have Orion and APM serve as that source.
This is coming in a few months.
