Book Image

SolarWinds Orion Network Performance Monitor

By : Joseph J Dissmeyer, Joseph Dissmeyer
Book Image

SolarWinds Orion Network Performance Monitor

By: Joseph J Dissmeyer, Joseph Dissmeyer

Overview of this book

Orion Network Performance Monitor is a scalable, easy-to-use, cost-effective network monitoring system that provides a complete overview of network environments by monitoring performance and availability. Orion NPM enables you to be proactive in detecting, diagnosing, and resolving network issues and outages and has the benefit of supporting hundreds of types of server, OS, and network vendors including Cisco, HP, Microsoft, Linux, Motorola, Brocade, Foundry, and more.Orion NPM is a well-known product and is used by thousands of public and private companies, educational institutions, and government entities for network monitoring. In "SolarWinds Orion Network Performance Monitor" you will learn how to install, implement, and manage Orion NPM to ensure you maintain an efficient, healthy, and performant network.In this book you will start with an overview of the constituent features of Orion NPM. Leading you through installation and configuration this book will help you set up a flexible and dynamic monitoring solution.With Orion NPM in place the book will then take you on a journey through essential Orion NPM and network monitoring concepts and practices. You will cover device management, learning how to use the Network Sonar Wizard, as well as adding devices manually.Turning from novice to pro, you will then be introduced to the core of network monitoring with Orion NPM. You will learn about monitoring Windows and Linux solutions as well as Virtual Servers. You will then master wireless networks and virtual networks. You will then learn how to set up and edit alerts to make network monitoring more efficient and less time-consuming. You will also learn how to develop reports and network maps as well as essential administrative techniques.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
SolarWinds Orion Network Performance Monitor
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Polling


Most network devices and servers use counters and gauges to track performance and network activity against a variety of hardware and software resources inside of the node. The data from each of these counters and gauges can be extracted by Orion NPM using industry standard protocols such as WMI and SNMP and presented in an easy-to-understand format through the Orion dashboard. The process for extracting the counter and gauge data from a node is called polling. There are two reasons why you poll nodes, they are as follows:

  • To verify the node's status

  • To gather statistics

Orion NPM polls for status to know if the node is available or if there is a problem. A common node status is if it is up or down. If the node is up, it is usually operating normally. If the node is down, then there is a good chance there is a problem with that device.

The second reason why we poll nodes is to gather statistics from the node's counters and gauges. We can gather CPU usage, free space available on storage...