Hi all,
I recently started to look into a better tool for managing our IP's then our spreadsheets and came across IP Address Management.
My only qualm with it, is it does not run as a service. I've seen that this functionality has been requested numerous times in the past on the forum (http://thwack.com/forums/t/2637.aspx) so I asked Solarwinds when this requested functionality would be integrated into the product. Their respone was as follows:
********************************************* Thank you for contacting SolarWinds. There is not going to be a change in the functionality of the tools in the toolset. By design these are applications and not services. You have to have the server logged in and the application running in order for it to keep running. The tools are not designed to run as 24/7 services, and this is not a feature we are going to implement.Regards,Matthew HarveySolarWinds Tier III Support*********************************************
While I don't find this to be a response that encourages me to buy further Solarwinds products, I at least know where they stand on the issue.
What is the most common way that people implement IP Address Management in there environment then? Do you just run it once in a while? Did you set it up as a service on your own? Do you just use a different tool completely?
Thank you all for your advice in cleaning up my IP spreadsheet mess.
Yes, this is a common request. The technician is correct, the Toolset is not really designed to be a 24/7 monitoring solution, so there is no way to run the tools as a service. There is a setting in the IP Address Management tool which determines the scan frequency for each subnet you have defined. You may set the scan frequency anywhere from 10 minutes to 7 days. If you are trying a DEMO and not liking the features you might consider looking into Orion, which is a more robust network monitoring tool and is designed to run as a service.
Mark Wiggans: If you are trying a DEMO and not liking the features you might consider looking into Orion, which is a more robust network monitoring tool and is designed to run as a service.
If you are trying a DEMO and not liking the features you might consider looking into Orion, which is a more robust network monitoring tool and is designed to run as a service.
Mark,
I'm interested in knowing how Orion can help with the IP address management problem that originally started this thread. I wasn't aware of a feature in Orion to do this.
Robert
Robert-
Specifically the Netflow module for Orion will provide Top XX IP address groupings with many statistics, Top Endpoints,Receivers,Applications,Protocol, destination & source by country, traffic in bytes,number of packets, % of traffic, etc..
HTH
Connect to a console session via Remote Desktop:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/0866b48e-aa78-40b2-b150-47fc679300d91033.mspx?mfr=true
Srvany.exe is included in the Windows Resource Kit, which can be downloaded here for Windows 2K3 Server :
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en
Detailed instructions on how to set up any .exe as a service can be found here:
http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=197
Jason,
Thank you for your input. In the past few days I have come up with a solution as well, which I'm posting for others:
I use two scheduled tasks:
1. One to start IP Address Management, which fires weekly2. Another to stop (taskkill /IM IP-ADD~1.exe) and backup the IP Address Management database, which fires on a weekly basis a half hour before the start-up job.
I also have to leave the server logged in.
Mark Wiggans: Yes, this is a common request. The technician is correct, the Toolset is not really designed to be a 24/7 monitoring solution, so there is no way to run the tools as a service. There is a setting in the IP Address Management tool which determines the scan frequency for each subnet you have defined. You may set the scan frequency anywhere from 10 minutes to 7 days. If you are trying a DEMO and not liking the features you might consider looking into Orion, which is a more robust network monitoring tool and is designed to run as a service.
Here is the part I don't get...
The "toolset is not really designed to be a 24/7 monitoring solution", but in the same post you say that you can "set the scan frequency anywhere from 10 minutes to 7 days".
Solarwinds is saying I can set a scan frequency for up to a week (thus the program would have to be running for a minimum of a week to hit that frequency), but it's not meant to be a constantly running solution. And why, anytime this is brought up, does somebody always jump in and say, "Buy our enterprise package" and not "Hey that's a great idea, it will be in the next release. Glad we could help".
I just think that there might be conflicting interests in having the Engineer's toolset be the best toolset that it could be (dare I mention crippleware in this instance), and Solarwinds trying to sell it's high end products. I can understand this, a lot of companies do it, it's just a bit disappointing.
Mark Wiggans: Specifically the Netflow module for Orion will provide Top XX IP address groupings with many statistics, Top Endpoints,Receivers,Applications,Protocol, destination & source by country, traffic in bytes,number of packets, % of traffic, etc..
The IP Address Management functionality does not exist in Orion.Netflow will only capture live traffic of any devices that happen to communicate through a router which you are monitoring.
We use the IPAM tool specifically to see what IP's are in use in a particular subnet & also to assign static IP's for servers and printers.We leave the tool running 7x24 with a local user account logged into the console session on the server.This is not the ideal method of running an application, especially with users across the country requiring access to reserve IP's.
<EDIT> The beauty of this tool is that you can publish the results to a web page. We publish a link to it to on our Orion server.The page is updated every 5 minutes & any subnet info can be saved to the users PC using the <right click> Save to Microsoft Excel function.If you have coding skillz you might be able to manipulate the Access DB directly using a web browser?Considering the price It does the job admirably. </EDIT>
This would be one of the few toolset apps that could be released as either a standalone product, or as an add-on to Orion.We are currently investigating using a product called Men & MIce for IPAM, but this tool is VERY pricey.
Just to give you some perspective from SolarWinds. To date, none of the tools in the Toolset run as a service. That's not to say we wouldn't do it in the future, but so far, functionality that grows beyond the desktop is morphed into its own product (e.g., Cirrus, Orion). Why not just add it to the Toolset? Well, once a product becomes a service and gets a long-term data store, the complexity of building, maintaining, and supporting the product go up (see, for comparison, Orion and Cirrus). If we build an enterprise-type product and leave it in the Toolset, we'd be forced to raise the price, which doesn't match our goals of having a copy of Toolset in the hands of every network engineer. I suppose we could sell it at a loss, but that's not really a sustainable business model. :-)
That only leaves the option of making a standalone product out of IP Address Management. It's been requested for years, and we've thought about it seriously. We may yet do it, but it's not in the immediate product road map because we're still a small company and feel we serve our customers best by focusing on a few products.
In the meantime, customers can derive tremendous value from the IPAM tool as it is. Mark and the rest of the community are providing creative ways to push the tool to do even more than it was originally intended. Since I've joined the company back in 2006, I have been continually struck by how far the SolarWinds user community manages is able to push and stretch the products. We build flexible tools; they flex them.
Based on your feedback, we're doing some addiitonal research on the IP address management (IPAM) market and would like to understand what you are looking for in an IPAM solution. Please help us out by completing the brief survey below:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=iT4wR00QT_2fCsEE8NjP0I6w_3d_3d
Thanks in advance for your help!
-Chris