My company has been using Solar Winds Orion since version 7 due to bad network managers. It was never fully utilized until I came along and started working on getting all of the network equipment put in, custom properties, user based views, advanced alerts, custom polling, and other related goodies. We also purchased Cirrus at version 2.5 and quickly made use of the simple ways to start the config downloads and weekly inventory. With all the enhancements that the Solar Wind's people keep suppling to their customers, we have Orion 8.5.1 covering us for network outages, I setup a trap collector page to alert us when we have power outages at branch offices (Liebert UPS), syslog pages for when people log out of config mode on our Cisco gear (currently looking at getting our Tacacs server to forward login info to syslog), etc etc. Cirrus 4 came with SNMPv3, 1/3 of our hear has been converted to SNMPv3 due to a pen test being done and some items failing with the pen test results.
Now for the terrible part, since we started with Orion v7 with MSDE, once we hit the 2 gig limit it was transferred to a 2000 SQL server, we then put the netflow module. Most of our server environment is all virtual with a SAN, with a windows Lotus Notes server and netflow running in the same environment the Solar Winds server was killing the SAN so well that other SQL DBs started failing; the size of the database had hit 60 gigs, transaction log 20 gigs. We then did the next logical step, we put the database on a physical box and saw results drop way down, however during this the database was upgraded from sql 2000 to 2005 to meet with compliance of ending support from Microsoft. Now with the database of 2.5 years has been upgraded to 2005 it is now stuck with only going onto a 2005 UAT SQL clustered server, within 3 days we destroyed the cluster; database size nearing 80 gigs data and a 60 gig transaction log. The cluster got rebuilt and we disabled the netflow service, and again the SQL server died, this was the breaking point for Orion. For a month we had to make do without Orion, while managers discussed if they wanted to stick with Solar Winds or go to HP OpenView......After many meetings and my manager raising hell we were finally able to make use of Orion again however the database would have to be started from scratch again. It took me 2 weeks to get all of the nodes back into the system due to all the baselines and backups the SQL team is doing, which should of been done from the start, however we are ninety percent back to where we were. Hopefully other users/customers never have the problem that we experienced, after we lost Orion for a month people started to realize how much harder a network engineer's job is when monitoring tools are not in place and ACLs are in place to only communicate with your Orion collector. With Orion and Cirrus in place my team did not have enough projects last year, so at the start of 08 we planned branch office upgrades/moves all the way into Nov....then we found out we are switching sales software, getting 30 Cisco WAAS units, Active Directory implementations, SMS dist. points, 2nd phase of Unified Communications, new warehouse scanners. We are only a staff of 4; 2 LAN/WAN/Security and 2 VoIP/Video Conf/Multimedia Collaboration, without Orion we would never be able to accomplish the above mentioned projects with our company's standards.
Orion 8.5.1 - SL2000 - Application - VoIP - Netflow - Wireless
Cirrus 4.0
Engineers Toolset