SolarWinds Orion 201 - System Management and Monitoring

Orion 201 teaches students how to design and implement end-to-end application monitoring by leveraging SolarWinds products.

Designed to help students evolve from basic up/down monitoring to a more holistic end-to-end approach that enables organizations to pinpoint the impact of performance issues and outages across complex application delivery environments, this course takes an in-depth look at NPM, NCM, SAM, DPA, WPM, SRM and Custom SQL Alerts and Reports.

Day 1

Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Orion Architecture Best Practices

• Primary Polling Engine
• Additional Polling Engines
• Additional Web Engines
• SQL Server

Discovery of Nodes in the Enterprise
Out-of-the-Box Monitoring vs. Custom Pollers

• Creation of Universal Device Pollers
• Creation of Custom Device Studio Pollers

NetPath Configuration
Network Insight for F5 Devices Overview

Students will perform NPM discovery in the context of application monitoring and mapping. They will get hands-on experience running network discovery scans.

Day 2

Network Configuration Manager (NCM) & Server and Application Monitoring (SAM)
Initial Configuration of NCM

• Creating Customized Device Templates
• Creating Customized Configuration Change Templates
• Working with and Understanding Compliance
• Overview of Change Approval Process

SAM Architecture Best Practices

• Additional Polling Engines and Web Engines
• SQL Server

Discovery of Applications in the Enterprise
AppInsight Templates vs Standard Templates

• AppInsight
• IIS, SQL, ActiveDirectory, and Microsoft Exchange

Custom Script Component Monitors

• Create Custom PowerShell Script Monitors

Baselining and Thresholds for Application Alerts

Students will see how to manipulate monitored objects directly in the Orion database while gaining an in-depth understanding of how to map all components of an application within an application delivery environment. Students will gain an understanding of how to monitor availability and performance, including identifying and setting thresholds for application performance.

Day 3

Database Performance Analyzer (DPA), Website Performance Monitor (WPM), Virtualization Manager (VMAN), Storage Resource Monitor (SRM), AppStack View, and Application Maps
Initial Configuration of DPA

• Importing IPAM data best-practices and caveats

Integration of DPA with Orion and SAM

• DPA Overview and Monitoring waits
• Blocks, Alerting & Reporting from the DPA Web Console

Configuration of WPM
Overview of WPM Capabilities

• User-Experience Monitoring Theories
• Alerting and Reporting with WPM data

Initial Configuration of VMAN
Integration of VMAN with Orion
VMAN Management
Alerting, and Reporting from the Orion Platform
Configuration of SRM
Alerting and Reporting with SRM data
Using Orion Maps to Create Hybrid Application Maps for the Enterprise
SolarWinds AppStack View Overview

Students will learn the differences between AppInsight and custom template monitors, and deploy both AppInsight for SQL and DPA.

Day 4

Custom SQL Alerts & Reports
Introduction to the Transact-SQL language and basic queries
Introduction to the Orion SQL Database schema
Custom SQL Reporting using both the Web Report Engine and the Orion Report Writer application
Custom SQL Alerts using the Web Alert Engine
Introduction to the SolarWinds Query Language (SWQL)

Students would highly benefit from a basic understanding of the Transact SQL and PowerShell languages.

Attendance of Orion 101 is not a requirement, but the 201 class will not cover installation or provide a basic overview of NPM, SAM, NCM and the Orion Platform

Network Engineers, System Administrators, SolarWinds Administrators, MS Exchange Administrators