Network Sonar Discovery is a quick way to add nodes in Orion and certainly the most common way. But you can also add nodes manually and there are several reasons you might want or need to do so. For starters, it’s the quickest way to start monitoring a new node on the network, rather than waiting for an automated discovery job to find it. Or it may be that you have a single node you need to monitor that sits on a network outside your discovery range, like a single server in a remote office. If that’s the only node you’ll be monitoring in that office, maybe you don’t want to create a discovery job or add a larger discovery range to an existing job. Or maybe the discovery job just can’t find the node because of high latency or because the node won’t respond to a ping. Another huge reason for manually adding a node is that you have tremendous control over how that node will be monitored, more so than when the node is found as part of a discovery job. So there are a variety of reasons you might find yourself adding nodes manually.
To add a node, go to Settings and under Getting Started with Orion, click Add A Node. First, enter the IP address of the node and choose the polling method. Here’s one of the nice differences between adding a node manually vs adding a node through a network sonar discovery job; you get complete control over how that node will be monitored including the polling method used. With network sonar discovery, there’s a hierarchy to the polling method assignment. It’s ICMP first, then SNMP, then WMI. And the majority of the time that’s just fine. But you may have certain nodes that you want to monitor differently, like a Windows server that you only want to monitor for up/down status. Adding the node manually gives you that control.
So I’ll choose the polling method and then assign a credential. With Network Sonar Discovery the credentials are tested in the order they are listed in the job settings and the first credential the node accepts will be the credential used. But when I add the node manually, I pick the credential. After clicking Next, Orion will authenticate to the node and run a discovery to find any elements it can monitor, like Volumes, interfaces, and so on. On the Choose Resources tab, it will build a list of those elements, so you get to see everything that COULD be monitored, but you have complete control over what WILL be monitored.
You’ll notice that there are some assumptions made as to what we think you may or may not want to monitor, but it’s still completely up to you.
Select just the elements you want, then click next.
Depending on which Orion modules you have installed, you may have some product specific tabs along with the basic one. For instance because I have SAM installed, I have an Add Application Monitors tab. This would let choose applications to monitor on the node. But since I’m not worried about application monitoring right now I’ll just click next to jump straight to the Change Properties tab.
On the Change Properties tab, you’ll see the polling method and credential that you’ve chosen. You can also change the polling interval, modify custom properties, and set alert thresholds. All of these features are discussed in other video segments so I won’t spend time on them here. So I could click OK now to add the node and begin monitoring.
But I do want to go back to why you might want to add nodes manually. Network Sonar Discovery is great for broadsweep discovery. However it doesn’t give you the same granularity and control over your monitoring that adding nodes manually does. And that makes a difference when it comes to cost, performance, and the metrics you’re going to see. So if I have a particular node I want to monitor a certain way, I’ll probably add it manually and I’ll do that before I run a discovery job. If you don’t and the node was added by a discovery job, you can always edit the properties of the node after the fact and you’ll still have all the same options for custom monitoring available to you. But if you do add a node manually, I’d recommend that you still include that node IP in one of your discovery job ranges. That way when the discovery job runs it will look for additions to the node, like new interfaces or volumes. And don’t worry about your custom settings, because manual settings will never be overwritten by automated processes, in other words the discovery job won’t mess up your custom monitoring. And that way you get sort of the best of both worlds; the complete control of adding nodes manually and the ongoing change detection of scheduled discovery jobs.
So now as soon as I click OK, the node will be added to the database, Orion will start monitoring, and I’ll be finished with adding my first node manually.
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