We use Solarwinds Cirrus and Orion for a large portion of our network management system. We're monitoring a few hundred devices and backing up configurations on about 150 routers/switches/servers/etc.
Orion is a great product for quickly adding very common items to a management station, such as disk/CPU/memory, and interface bandwidth charts. They recently came out with custom MIB support, but it's kind of clunky to use and doesn't yet support tables. The web interface is great, but you cannot perform any management such as adding/deleting/modifying nodes from there - yet. The alerting engine is pretty good, but we don't use it extensively as others, because we use ipMonitor 8 (recently purchased by Solarwinds). Cirrus is pretty good at policy management enforcement and backing up router/switch configurations. Pretty much anything you can telnet or SSH to, you can back up a config on. It's lacking a *tad* bit on security and there's little to no integration with Orion - yet. I personally still use RANCID for my primary config backup because Cirrus emails every time a device configuration changes, rather than combining all changes into a single email. Also, it's somewhat difficult to parse the change emails, because of their silly wide format. You'll notice that there are a lot of 'yet's in this email. This is because Solarwinds is constantly developing their applications. They are a somewhat small company and listen well to their customers. Many of their developers and support staff actively monitor and participate in their public community forums at http://www.thwack.com. In short, I would say that if all you are looking for is a decent replacement for what you have now, this combination would work. If you are looking for extensive SNMP trap capabilities, Orion isn't quite up to snuff. But, as I said, Solarwinds is vigorously developing updates, add-ons, and bug fixes for their applications, so stay tuned. -evt > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Stu Packett > Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2007 10:38 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [c-nsp] Solarwinds Orion & Cirrus - Thoughts? > > I maintain a midsize network with about 75 routers, switches, > firewalls in > total. I'm currently using Kiwi Syslog for syslogs; MRTG for > bandwidth > graphing; WhatsUp for SNMP traps; and Kiwi CatTools for > config management. > All these on different servers. > > I was looking for an "all-in-one" product so I can place all > these functions > on one server. After some research, I found Solarwinds Orion > and Cirrus. > >From my reading, it appears Solarwinds Orion can take over > the syslog, > bandwidth graphs, and SNMP traps. The Solarwinds Cirrus > would then take > over the config management. We don't mind paying for > software as I know > that open source will always be a good recommendation by others. > > The Solarwinds products are somewhat new to me so I wanted to > know if I am > correct in saying that both these Solarwinds products can > take over these > functions. Also, I'm open to hear any comments, thoughts, > opinions, etc > about these products. Thanks in advance. > _______________________________________________ > cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] > https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp > archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/ > _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
