Rollout: SolarWinds' Orion 8.1

Small and midsize enterprises looking for a feature-rich network-management product that won't break the bank need look no further than SolarWinds' Orion 8.1. With new features that include an advanced alert engine and support for SNMPv3, and a price well within the means of the tightest budget, Orion is a logical shortlist candidate.

But it's not the only candidate. Appliance vendors and those offering SaaS (software as a service) compete with SolarWinds on pricing and ease of deployment. How Orion will fare depends on how comfortable customers are in dealing with software, and whether they'll trust a service from a small provider.

Finally, companies at the larger end of the SME scale will look beyond Orion for advanced capabilities and a distributed polling architecture.

Fully Packed

Orion packs a lot into the 8.1 release. In addition to existing table-stakes features, such as autodiscovery, default historical reports and alert capability, 8.1 adds the ability to receive SNMP traps, and it supports SNMPv3 and custom MIB polling. New audible alerts can be generated from the Web console, in addition to the Orion server. This is particularly useful for alerting personnel in NOC environments.

The 8.1 release also includes an advanced alert engine that has been enhanced to allow more flexibility to customize specific alerts and corresponding actions within an alert wizard.

Orion uses an integrated SQL Server database for its data repository, making setup a snap. And the company provides complete information about performance issues such as availability, bandwidth capacity and latency, plus information about fault problems around buffer errors, interface errors and discards.We used the Web console to monitor which nodes and interfaces were available, as well as view Top 10 lists that detailed specific performance problems such as CPU utilization and high bandwidth utilization.

Orion did a great job of alerting us when we took interfaces down and flooded ports with additional traffic. You can select e-mail, paging, SNMP traps that can be forwarded to another management application, text-to-speech or syslog. You also can launch third-party remediation tools based on specific alerts and set up predefined actions defined in the alert wizard.

Size Matters

In the SME market, vendors like ScienceLogic (see a review of ScienceLogic's EM7), NetQoS and NetScout provide easy-to-deploy appliances. SaaS offerings, such as those from Netreo (see a review of Netreo OmniCenter OnDemand), Klir and SilverBack Technologies, require little or no software installation. SMEs also can turn to the open-source MRTG.

On the size front, while Orion reports to monitor as many as 50,000 interfaces, many organizations would struggle to use the software with an infrastructure of that size. In larger organizations, we typically see multiple pollers physically distributed in the environment, which then send data back to a central location. This architecture is not supported in Orion.Larger environments also benefit from more integration, such as bidirectional trouble-ticketing gateways that can open and close issues without copying and pasting incident-management information. These limitations may frustrate an IT shop where performance and fault management are critical. Also, if you need any support for TL1, the telecommunications management protocol, or deep application-performance monitoring, Orion is not for you.

That said, with management of 100 interfaces starting at $2,475, SolarWinds' Orion is a real deal that belongs on most SME shortlists. n

Michael Biddick is a contributing editor for Network Computing and Executive Vice President of Solutions for Windward Consulting Group, a firm that helps organizations improve it operational efficiency. Write to him at [email protected].