Today I'm going to take a look at the Server and Application Monitor from Solarwinds. If you haven't heard of Solarwinds before head over to their site and take a look. They have some pretty neat free products which are worth knowing about (everyone likes free stuff, right?!) http://www.solarwinds.com/downloads/. I'll be focusing on the installation of Solarwinds SAM (Server and Application Monitor), the dashboard, getting started and configuring alerts.
Server and Application Monitor - Agentless Application & Server Performance Monitoring
- Monitors performance & user experience for virtually any application – Microsoft® Exchange, Active
- Directory®, IIS, any ODBC database, & more
- Monitors server hardware faults & operating systems across platforms – Windows®, UNIX, Linux®, & more
- Provides expert guidance on what to monitor, why to monitor it, & optimal thresholds
- Includes customizable dashboards & reports showing trends, capacity, & performance
- Easy to download & deploy in less than an hour, easy to use, & easy on your budget.
Installation
You can download a fully functional 30 day trial directly from Solarwinds here: http://info.solarwinds.com/SAM52_thesysadmins. I've loaded it into a Server 2008 R2 guest machine on top of Hyper-V. Pre-reqs are pretty light, server-side primarily needing .NET 3.5 SP1 and 4.0.
You can perform two types of install, express and advanced. The express installation will install a local copy of SQL Express, and the advanced install will allow you to specify a dedicated SQL server. Solarwinds recommend you run the SQL data on a seperate physical server- as my test network is fairly light I opted for an express install.
The installation adds various local applications on the Solarwinds server (alert configuring, database maintenance, network discovery and others) and brings up the main admin web console on port 8787. Browse to http://solarwindsserver:8787 and login with admin (no password).
This brings you onto the main dashboard.
Dashboard and Getting Started
The dashboard is pretty bare on first start, as you'd expect but getting started is pretty straight forward. There is a "Discover my Network" wizard that allows you to configure SNMP, Windows and vCenter/ESX credentials. You can add a subnet, IP range or specific nodes to add to be discovered.
The wizard will scan the configured IP range / nodes and display the discovered nodes. You can select or deselect the nodes you want to monitor and the type of applications you want to search for.
There is a massive list of applications you can monitor, I've listed them in a text file here: Solarwinds-Applications-List
Follow the wizard through and Solarwinds SAM will start polling the configure nodes and application monitors.
The Dashboard should start to populate, you can customize the dashboard to show a whole array of useful information- it means you can really get everything you need to see at a quick glance on one screen. I've configured various layouts in the screenshots below:
Alerts
You're more than likely going to want to receive some form of alert for example when a node goes down, or physical disk space reaches n%. Managing alerts is a doddle, and I managed to setup several different alerts in a few minutes. There are a lot of options and triggers to choose from, all of the counters you'd expect to see are there, volume percent used, response time, % CPU utilization, used system memory to name a few.
Plenty of options for alert type.
Thoughts
I've been using this product on and off for around a week now and it's been very easy to setup and use. Installation was straight forward and configuring the software to perform the required monitoring wasn't a massive chore like it can be (Nagios I'm looking at you), the wizards and simple interface made everything a breeze. The Dashboard is attractive and is highly customizable which means I can set it up exactly how I like without having to touch any code. Overall it seemed like a well thought out, complete product.