Today, after five months, i'm finishing another Infrastructure monitoring contract. A successful Solarwinds deployment for a NHS service provider. A few achievements : I have automated alerting based upon custom application monitoring templates and thresholds. I have designed some really clever performance / capacity reports that will be used to report back to NHS Digital [...]
When you integrate SolarWinds Orion and your ServiceNow incident management system you can configure Orion alerts to generate incidents that respond to monitored events in your environment, such as a failed hard drive or a change in server health. Integrating ServiceNow with your Orion platform applications helps ensure that all Orion alerts are addressed in [...]
Download the MySQL ODBC connector Download the ODBC connector from https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/Install the MSI on the Solarwinds poller that will connect to the database for monitoring. Once the connector is installed add a new SYSTEM DSN connection to the database. Run a test to see if the connector has been setup correctly and to test [...]
Monitoring an Application (SAM) Log on to your SolarWinds Web Console with an Administrator account. Click the Settings / All Settings Find Product Specific Settings and Click SAM Settings. In the Getting Started with SAM box, Click Manually Assign Application Monitors. Select the Application Monitor template you want to apply, and then click Next. Select the server node [...]
Maintenance Mode If you need to deactivate nodes for a period of time, you can do so by unmanaging / putting the node into maintenance mode. Changes you make to the managed or unmanaged status of a node takes affect after the next polling cycle. To unmanage a node : Log on to your [...]
I encountered a problem yesterday that started when a customer reported a minor application issue. It demonstrated a common logistical problem that happens across many organisations when engineers attempt to fix customer issues and end up creating problems while trying to access servers. Here is the common application server support problem : An engineer builds [...]
What is WMI? Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is a set of Microsoft specifications for consolidating the management of devices and applications in a network from Windows computing systems. WMI was first introduced and can be utilised on computers running Windows 95, Windows 98 and NT and later editions of Windows. WMI [...]
What is SNMP? Developed in 1988 to provide network-device-monitoring capability for TCP/IP-based networks, SNMP was approved as an Internet standard in 1990 by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and has been in wide use since that time. More recently, Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX)-based networks have added support for SNMP. Currently, most network equipment vendors provide [...]
The bad old days. When there was no such thing as infrastructure monitoring, it was all about logs, everything was manual. Support processes were tedious and long winded often resulting in site visits or lengthy remote desktop sessions. "The last to know support desk" was a common occurrence. Technical support teams were fire-fighting problems [...]
Operational Shutdown Before making any changes to the Solarwinds environment, such as patching, application or OS, a shutdown of the Solarwinds services is required. Orion Service Manager can be located on the Solarwinds application server and is a better alternative to having to stop and start services manually. To shutdown Solarwinds correctly click stop everything. [...]
