Middle Managers: Page 5 of 28

For example, a display titled "overview" showed two groups of icons--one for each node and one for the interfaces. The icons actively display the status of each interface, which is a useful, quick update. We've found this feature in many network management applications, including Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold. But what is unique to Orion is that the node and interface stats can be tied to different metrics, including percent utilization, errors, discards today or in the last hour, current signal-to-noise ratio, averages of collected data, and bits transferred on the interface. You can set these values or allow users to change them as needed.

Orion can't parse event streams or correlate events, as HP's and CA's products do, but a handy set of macros is provided wherein you can broadly categorize such variables as node name, time, interface, address, SNMP community, status, response time, speed and errors, and insert them into event text.

Take note that the paint is still wet on this utility. There's no Layer 2 discovery, no discovery or monitoring of trunked links, and no port scans of TCP/UDP services. But what's there works.

Discovery is ICMP- and SNMP-limited by subnet, or seed router. We like a "don't discover" or "not" list, so discovery can be limited to specific interfaces without looking at an entire ARP cache on a gateway router, but Orion does not offer this option. When you hit a heavily populated cache, all the devices get checked. If you're anything like us, you'll want to limit what you manage; in that case, Orion's discovery will be too much and you'll just add the devices manually. At least we felt that was easier than deleting devices one at a time.

During our testing SolarWinds sent us its new mapping tool. It was buggy initially but eventually provided basic bitmaps with links to underlying status.