Last week, I put together a list of Network Management Tools that I use on a daily basis and find helpful. Now, I want to spotlight each of those tools. First up on the list: Solarwinds Orion.

Orion is an awesome tool and is the heart of our network management system. It allows me to create visual maps of the network and drill down from the network overview, to a physical location, to device, and then to an individual interface. We can see at a glance any locations, devices, or interfaces with problems.  If any network device goes down or sees packet loss, I immediately get an email.

Orion has really allowed us to be a lot more proactive at managing the network.  In the past, we didn’t know there was a problem until a user called and said they couldn’t access the network.  Then, we had to identify which device had the issue.  With Orion, we can often identify and begin working on a network issue before the end user even knows.

Below are a few screenshots of our environment.

Main page - we can see the entire network at a glance (any location with a problem will have a red exclamation point) as well as a list of current and recent problems:

Individual location - this is out East Cobb location.  A similar map exists for each physical location.  Here, we have every network device located at this location.  The list below the map gives a quick status of each devices and the links between them.  All devices are currently up, which is good, but any device that’s down will have a red exclamation point on it.

Now, let’s look at a device.  Here, we’re looking at our core switch/router.  We get some nice general stats, such as CPU and memory utilization and response time, as well as a lot more detail in the left column: IP address, Device type, host name, IOS version, and last boot time.

Further down the page, we get a list of all of the monitored interfaces on this device, along with their status (up or down), description, and current utilization.  As you can see, the network isn’t very busy today.

From here, we can drill down into an actual interface and see a lot of information about current conditions on that interface, as well as generate custom charts showing historical data.

As you can probably tell, I am really happy with Orion.  There are definitely cheaper products out there, but I haven’t found another product that’s as easy to navigate while giving me this much information about the network.  Once you get more than a couple of switches and servers, a network monitoring tool like this is essential to keep the network up and running at peak performance.