Showing network health by using SolarWinds NPM
Introduction
OpsMgr is great for monitoring servers and ‘things’ which run on servers. Through management pack authoring it is possible to monitor anything which can be contacted through the network.
In principal SCOM can monitor network devices as switches, routers, etc. It fulfils basic demands. Compared to other network - monitoring tools the user interface is slow and ductile. Effort in administration is high and requires a certain skill set.
In contrast SolarWinds NPM is a lightweight and easy to use network monitoring solution. It can be learned in short time and the UI is quiet responsive.
My personal favorite is underlying REST - Web Service which SolarWinds uses for all its network management or monitoring tools. It can be easily queried and responds in JSON. Queries are formulated in a SQL dialect SWQL and can be tested in the SWQL Studio
A SDK is available and maintained on github. - https://github.com/solarwinds/OrionSDK/wiki
Problem
- Get network device information into SCOM, benefiting from SolarWinds NPM.
- Having health state of devices available to be further used in Distributed Applications.
Design
- A Windows Server, taking the role of ‘SolarWinds Monitoring Server’.
- Scripts inside the Management Pack will query the REST services to pass information about Topology and Health to OpsMgr.
Configuration
By default, monitoring is enabled, alerting not. If required, overrides can be created and stored in an ‘override management pack’.
The default interval of 5 minutes is used to query SolarWinds NPM. This can be changed as usual.
Network devices are categorized by names. E.g. Switch; name contains ‘sw’, Router; name contains ‘gw’ or ‘vpn’, Firewall; name contains ‘fw’
If that does not fit your requirement it can be easily changed in the DiscoverNPMNodes.ps1 as part of the Visual Studio solution.
The monitoring script, MonitorNPMNodes.ps1 need to be changed as well.
Usage
State view show the state of a particular item:
Diagram view gives detail about the particular item:
Inventory View:
Management Pack Source
GitHub: https://github.com/Juanito99/SolarWinds_NPM_OpsMgr
The following steps are required to setup the SCOM integration for SolarWinds
1) Create a user account in Active Directory and assign ‘read only’ permissions in SolarWinds’ NCM
As example the account name could be ‘[email protected]’
The following permissions worked:
2) Select one Windows Server that is monitored by SCOM Agent
Set the following registry settings to make this server to the 'SolarWinds-Monitoring-Server'
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ABCIT\NPMMonitoringServer]
"NPMServerName"="servername.nwtraders.msft"
"NPMServerPort"="17778"
"NPMServerProtocoll"="https"
"NPMInformationServiceURL"="SolarWinds/InformationService/v3/Json/Query?"
"NPMQryUsr"="[email protected]"
"NPMQryPwd"="Moody13:50"
Customize the parameters so that it reflects your environment of cause.
3) Import the Management Pack
URL for the Visual Studio – VSAE 2015 solution, fully customizable: https://github.com/Juanito99/SolarWinds_NPM_OpsMgr/tree/master/ABC.Network.SolarWinds.NPM
URL for the Management Pack file that contains Icons:
https://github.com/Juanito99/SolarWinds_NPM_OpsMgr/blob/master/ABC.Network.SolarWinds.NPM/ABC.Network.SolarWinds.NPM/bin/Debug/ABC.Network.SolarWinds.NPM.mpb
URL for the Management Pack file that doesn’t contains Icons, but can be customized: https://github.com/Juanito99/SolarWinds_NPM_OpsMgr/blob/master/ABC.Network.SolarWinds.NPM/ABC.Network.SolarWinds.NPM/bin/Debug/ABC.Network.SolarWinds.NPM.xml
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