At this point in my deployment I have run some discovery jobs, I’ve added some nodes manually so I’ve got several nodes added to the database. And now the polling engine is quietly cranking away gathering data in the background. So let’s take a look at a couple of those nodes and see what we’re getting. From my Summary view, I’m going to expand my All Nodes resource to take a look at my Cisco devices, and I’m going to click on my Router 1 object. This takes me into the Node Details view, which is one of the more common views you’ll be looking at.
There’s a lot of information in this view, but I want to highlight a couple of the main resources, starting with Node Details. Here you can see the node status, IP address, and basic information about the node.
Below that you can see the Hardware details and Current Hardware health.
Over in the right hand column I can see any alerts that are currently active on the node… I can see availability stats…
I can scroll down and see things like my current interface utilization.
On the left hand side of the view, I can jump from the Node Details summary tab to the Vital stats tab and see more details, like my average CPU and Memory utilization. This all great information and it’s there for me by default without having to configure anything, but the metrics I see are going to be dependent on how I’m polling this node. If I jump back to the Summary tab and click on edit node under the management resource, under polling method you’ll see that I’m monitoring my router via SNMP.
So all of these metrics I’m looking at are based on a common set of MIB and object IDs for a Cisco device. Different polling methods are going to provide different sets of metrics. If I was monitoring using ICMP, about all I’d see is the up/down status of the node. But let me take a look and one of my Windows servers that I’m monitoring using WMI.
I’m still looking at the Node Details view, and I still have a Node Details section that looks fairly similar to the Node Details for my router. But notice that my management resource looks different. I have different options available based on the monitoring and management capabilities of the WMI protocol. I can do things like start and stop services or reboot the server with WMI.
There are a lot of metrics that SNMP and WMI will have in common, like when I jump to the Vital stats tab you’ll see that I have Average CPU and Memory utilization here again. But down below that, I can also see disk volume details, which is something SNMP doesn’t typically monitor. So keep in mind the polling method is going to dictate the metrics you can capture. So the node details view can provide a ton of information about the node, but it’s also a great starting place for drilling deeper into your monitoring. For instance, while I’m looking and my Disk volumes here, I can see that my c: drive is currently 79% full.
If I want a better look at what’s going on with drive, I can click on it and drill down into the Volume Details view, where I can see things like my usage history and disk IOPS.
I’m not going to look at the Volume Details view right now, I just want to point out that from the Node Details view you can drill down further to look at any elements on the node. So I can look at volumes, or interfaces, or applications, anything that’s being monitored on the node I can get to from Node Details. So the Node Details view really is your starting point for monitoring in Orion.
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