Hi, my name is Nikki
Jennings Sales Engineering Director here at SolarWinds. Today, I will walk you
through the installation of Orion Network Monitor Version 10. This is a newly
released, very enhanced product with robust features and an out of the box solution
that will allow you to see critical performance metrics in your environment.
The Orion Network Performance Monitor delivers comprehensive fault and performance
management that scales with rapid network growth and expands your network
monitoring needs, allowing you to collect and view availability in real-time
historical stats directly from your web browser.
On the SolarWinds.com homepage, you
will see the support link. If you select that, you will have the option to
preview the knowledge base articles, but, I recommend that you get started by
choosing the evaluation guide. We offer the evaluation guide in different
languages and you can choose one here.
The guide will walk you through in a step-by-step wizard on how to get
up and running. Orion is very intuitive and is easy to install. But in the
event that you need to go back and review some resource information, you do
have access to that here.
Let’s review a few pre-requisites for
the Orion installation. The Orion Network Performance Monitor is an enterprise
class monitoring solution. However, it scales down to small offices, as well as,
enterprise environments with large offices and multi-sites.
You can install Orion on a windows
server. It supports R2, Windows 2008 and Windows 2008R2 as well. There are some cases where you are not going
to have a server right at your fingertips, so running the evaluation on XP or
Vista is okay, but just keep in mind that when you decide to move into a
production environment that you are going to need a server platform in order to
run and have the best optimal performance out of the Orion solution. Today, I will
walk you through an installation on a Windows 2008 R2. As I mentioned before,
there are some things that you are going to need to do prior to the
installation of Orion, and I will walk you through that today.
First, you will need to have IAS
installed. On your Windows 2008 box, go
to START, ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS and select the SERVER MANAGER. Go ahead and
expand rolls. And add a roll here and
simply just hit NEXT. Choose the WEB SERVER for IAS and follow the wizard. Regarding
the Roles services, it is very important that you choose asp.net and then go
ahead and add the required Roles services.
And then, I am going to scroll down to the bottom. You can choose
Windows Authentication, but you will also want to choose Basic Authentication
in the event that you decide to evaluate the Orion Network Configuration
Management Application.
Finally, you should choose the IAS
Six compatibility. Once that is done, go ahead and hit NEXT…and INSTALL. Now
that the installation is complete, we will just go ahead and select CLOSE here.
Minimize the screen and pop over to the INSTALLER. Simply, launch INSTALLER and
let this run through.
In order for Orion to
properly function, it is going to install components that are not installed by
default. The SQL server common language run time also known as CLR will require
a restart of the SQL server service. I have not mentioned this before but the
Orion uses the Microsoft SQL back-in database. We support XPRESS obviously with
the evaluation and then, of course, 2008, 2005 and your production environment.
The Orion NPM uses the secure SQL CLR store procedures, for selected
non-business data operations in order to improve the performance. Go ahead and
INSTALL.
Go ahead and hit NEXT. You want to
make sure that you review the EULA. Scroll down and review that information and
then SELECT I accept the terms of the licence agreement and then hit NEXT.
By default, I am going
to install Orion in the C:/ Directory. However, you can browse to a different
volume or directory on your system, for space conservation. I will leave it
DEFAULT for today. Select NEXT. This is very important. We had two different
options. We had the XPRESS installation in the evaluation. That is going to
install SQL XPRESS for you, so you do not have to go out and separately
download Microsoft SQL XPRESS. It is
going to go through the installation for you and guide you with the wizard. If
you wish to use a SQL server that exists in your environment today, you may
choose the ADVANCED INSTALL option. However, you will need to specify the SQL
server database instance name in order to connect to it. You will also need the
proper credentials in order to either (a) create a database, or (b) to use an
existing database. If you are using an existing database, the user account only
needs to be in a DB_OWNER (read: DB underscore Owner) database role. If you are
using an existing SQL account, the user account needs to be in the DB owner
database roll for the Orion NPM database.
For the purposes of today’s
demonstration, I will select the XPRESS install. Here you can actually see that
the installation is going through the Microsoft SQL server XPRESS install now. This
makes it easy for you to get things set up and running quickly so you can go
ahead and discover the devices in your environment and start monitoring them
immediately. Now that the installation is complete, the configuration wizard
will load. In the event that the configuration wizard does not load, and you
don’t see this screen here, then you need to go to START, PROGRAMS, SOLARWINDS
ORION, and then go to CONFIGURATION and AUTO-DISCOVERY to manually launch the
Configuration wizard. It will then take you to this screen. The Orion
Configuration wizard will install all of the necessary services in order for
Orion to run, the Pulling Engine, the Web Component and of course, all of the
services that are required. It will also walk you through creating a SQL
database. This is where all the data will be stored.
Now the Orion database and the Orion
website are set up and all the services are running. Go ahead and select FINISH
here. That will take you to the Orion Network
Performance Monitor web console. By default, you should type in ADMIN with no
password. You can change that later.
Then you will be in the Network Sonar wizard. Remember, we collect data
through SNMP. We support versions 1, 2 and 3. We do a ping on devices for
availability and to calculate response time. In order to scan your entire
environment, you will need to be able to get to those devices. You will need to
indicate what the READ-ONLY community string is here and you want to make sure
that you check any Access Control list or security parameters in the event that
you have any devices that are returned as unknown. That is always the first
thing to check.
I will do a quick walkthrough. I am
going to use PUBLIC as my default. We do actually have the option to poll for
ESX. In version 9.5.1, we supported ESX 3.5.
In version 10, we support Vsphere as well. Go ahead and add your ESX
credentials. Again, READ-ONLY. Go ahead and say ADD. And then say NEXT. Indicate
your range. You could use SUBNET. You could also do a BULK IMPORT in the event
that you have a list of IP addresses if you are not very concerned about
everything in your environment. Whatever works best for you, just put that
information in here. We will do a short one today. And select next.
Obviously, everyone’s environment is
going to be different. In some cases, you will have your satellite offices as
your remote locations or have high latency for whatever reason between the
Orion NMS system and your target devices. You can adjust the SNMP timeout, as
well as, the SNMP retries and obviously any hops in between. You can increment
that number. The discovery timeout is
going to default to 60, but it is configurable.
I will leave that as is and just hit NEXT. This is one of the really
great features that we added into Version 10. It is the Discovery Scheduling
functionality. Now, you do not run a discovery of your environment every day to
understand what was actually implemented.
As networks grow today, they have a tendency to be very dynamic,
especially with virtualization. Here you can actually select the frequency of
the scan. You can choose once and can customize a scan every six or four hours
depending on what you are actually scanning. Just make sure you take into
consideration that it may not be necessary to scan some Subnets as often as
others. And then, of course, if you want to do a daily scan, you can do that as
well. I will leave this on once and run the discovery now.
Now we have come to the page for
device types to import. Here is a list of CISCO devices and you are going to
see “unknown.” Remember, when you see something “unknown” it means that Orion
is not able to do an SNMP GET REQUEST against that device. One or two things
are usually the cause of this. Perhaps, you do not have the right community
string and/or there is some type of security parameter on that device that is
not allowing the Orion server to do a request against it. So, for a Windows
server, check on the SERVICES AND SECURITY tab to ensure that Orion has
permission and then make sure you always make sure you check your AQLs. Hit
NEXT here. These are in the interfaces. I am going to go ahead and select to
import all of them. Volumes –the physical
logical discs on my systems. Today I will
select OPERATIONALLY DOWN and SHUTDOWN. Remember, in the evaluation, there are
no limitations. The only limitation to the evaluation is the thirty-day time
limit.
Go ahead and import everything you
have in your environment. You can cull it down later if you want. Now that you
have the list, select IMPORT and away it goes.
Now we will get to the
really good stuff. We’ve got two tabular views up here. Your homepage will have
a SUMMARY, TOP TEN ALERTS and SYSLOG, etcetera by default. The MY NETWORK tab is
going to focus on your network. This will allow you a lot more functionality in
creating different menus and customizing dashboard for your environment so you
can see critical events as they occur on the fly. Go back to HOME and select
SUMMARY VIEW. This is everything in your environment. You have a list of all
devices and by default they are categorized by vendor. Now, you can go in and
actually create custom properties and set up different groups. If you have
different locations or if you want to categorize by critical routers, switches,
you can actually set up these groups and go in and set that level here. You can
categorize by vendor, by any of my custom properties that I have created three
levels deep.
Back on the SUMMARY HOME tab, I will quickly
drill into a device for you. Remember, this is all pre-configured in Orion. All
you need to do is to install the software, know what the READ-ONLY community
string is, do a scan and you are ready to go. You will have nice gauges, response time,
packet loss and then of course, through SNMP, Orion will provide you with the CPU
load, memory usage and details about that particular system. On the right hand
side is your historical data. You will need to let it collect for a bit in
order to start utilizing these charts. I recommend that you install Orion, add
in all your devices and let it run for a good three to five days in order to
understand the baseline in your environment. This will give you an idea of the threshold
of all your devices in terms of CPU load, memory utilization and traffic statistics.
One great feature that I mentioned
earlier that we added into Orion Version 10 is the support for VMware Vsphere version
4. So with just a couple of clicks and only having that READ-ONLY account from
the ESX host, you will see on the left hand side the Response Time, Packet
Loss, CPU load, Memory Statistics of the ESX server itself that is the host. On
the right hand side, you are going to have a list of all of your virtual
machines, name of operating system, information about the state of the guest OS
and then how much of your resources are each one of these machines actually
consuming on your box. If you are using V-Motion, as a lot of people are, as
long as you add-in your ESX host, you will be able to track these virtual
machines as they move from host machine to host machine.
If you scroll down to the bottom, as
you have allowed it time to actually collect data, you will see some really
great graphs. Of course, I do not have any because we have just added this ESX
host in, but you will see a stack chart of all your virtual machines and it
will show you CPU consumption by VM. Then it will show memory consumption and
of course, network traffic by the end. Don’t forget that the Orion Network Performance
Monitor has a very robust alerting engine. So you can alert and report on all
of this data. Quickly, let me walk you through the alerting engine. You will go
to START, PROGRAMS, SOLARWINDS ORION, choose your ALERTING and open your
ADVANCED ALERT MANAGER. Select CONFIGURE ALERTS here and then add a new one.
Ensure that you have set the frequency.
By default will be set to every one minute. Name your alerts and then
specify your trigger condition. Add a simple condition by selecting here where it
says, NETWORK NODES then chose Vendor.
If anything in your Cisco category
goes into a down state, you will be notified. Add another simple condition here
to say NETWORK KNOWN node status. Then, of course, node status is not equal to
up. Now, these can get very complex, so I recommend that install Orion, allow
data to collect over time and get your baseline first because you do not want
to set alerts without knowing what is normal in your environment. After that, you can then get familiar with
the alerting engine. You can establish a reset condition when it is either no
longer true or reset based upon the following conditions that you have
set. We do offer alert suppression. For
example, you may have an edge router at a remote location and behind that
router you have a lot of switches. In the event that that router was to go
down, everything behind it is going to be offline providing that the NMS is
located at another location. As opposed to you receiving alerts on all of these
switches, you just want to receive one alert, so here you would say suppress
the alerts if the device or router is actually down.
Then these are the actions that you
can take. You can layer these actions and you can do escalations. There are a
lot of different things that you can do here. And then you can set a recent
action – Notify me when everything is okay. Cancel out of that now. Let’s quickly review some of the things that
you might run into during an installation. If you get stuck and you have any
problems, there are a couple of good, general rule of thumbs to follow. First
of all, do not install the Orion Network Performance Monitor with a domain
admin account. You need to install with the local admin account. It is very
important that you understand permission settings. If you do have any issues, I
recommend that you navigate to your computer here and go to the C: drive or the
directory that you have chosen to install Orion. Go to
PROGRAM FILES. Choose SOLARWINDS and ORION.
Within this directory we added the ORION PERMISSION CHECKER. This is one
of the first things that you need to check if you have any problems. Right here, you see the ORION PERMISSION
CHECKER. You can launch that and then click CHECK and it will actually let you
know that the results actions and if you had any problems.
It looks like I did have a failure,
however, the Orion Network Performance Monitor was able to install. This is
very helpful if you need to troubleshoot. Now if you do have other issues with
your installation, you can go to START, PROGRAMS, SOLARWINDS ORION and select
the documentation and support link and select ORION DIAGNOSTICS. Go ahead and
launch that and hit START. So now what? Now that you have collected the
diagnostics, contact your Sales Representative or Support team member and open
a ticket. Even though you are evaluating
Orion, you can open a ticket with us under EVALUATION and one of my Sales
Engineers reach out to you to get Orion up and running in your environment.
Lastly, I want to mention Thwack, our
online user community. At SolarWinds, we are very focused around our users and
we care what you say and what you think. That is how we have written and
designed Orion, for Network Engineers and Server Administrators like you. We
have over 29,000 users associated with our community forum. You will find blogs
and great content on this site. There is content exchange sharing the scripts
and a lot of our customers like to share how they had implemented Orion in
their environment. You can also select the SUPPORT link here and it will give
you a list of all the tutorials and documentation to help you get started. If
you need to submit a ticket, you will find that on the right. Now, do not
forget, we offer lots of different modules, so go to solarwinds.com to check
out Orion Network Configuration Manager, Application Performance Monitor,
Netflow Traffic Analyzer, IPAM, and IP SLA. If you have any questions, you know
who to call.
Please do not hesitate to reach out
to us. Thank you for your time today and I will look forward to working with
you again soon.