Integrate Solarwinds NPM with SCOM

 

Make your network device state visible in SCOM by gathering information from 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:

Management Pack Source

GitHub:
https://github.com/Juanito99/SolarWinds_NPM_OpsMgr

 

Setup Guide

Only a few steps are required to start using this MP. Details on:
http://www.rjz.de/SolarWindsNPMToOpsMgrSetup

 

Source: http://www.systemcentercentral.com/