>>This session, Karla, is going to be a lot of fun
because we're talking about IP Monitor.
And we're talking about the fact that small businesses
now really have increasingly complex monitoring needs
but they still have to do it on a budget.
>>Right, because IT is famous for doing a whole lot
on a limited budget.
>>Right, I mean no where else is that more true
than small businesses where often the budgets
are used to cover other needs for the business
like other departments.
>>Yeah, and in this session, Patrick,
we want to talk about the three approaches to monitoring
being used by Solarwinds small business customers.
You know Solarwinds has ipMonitor Free Edition,
ipMonitor License Edition
and of course the Orian Platform.
Sooner or later as your business grows
having a clear understanding of what's up
and what's down is really critical to business objectives.
>>And no matter how long you've been working in IT
everyone hits a certain point
where they need effective monitoring.
Now we're not talking about a solution
that scales to tens of thousands of devices,
but something more than just basic availability ping sweeps.
And today, many small business actually now carry
the same complexities as larger businesses
and require server and infrastructure monitoring
along with printer management and IP phones.
The trick is, of course,
that they don't have big company budgets.
>>Absolutely, and I think the rabbit hole
a lot of folks fall into is that they've
picked a free solution but it really is a limited solution
that requires a lot of care and feeding.
>>Right.
A lot of the free and open source tools
sort of fall into that category.
You think you're getting a great free monitor...
>>And sometimes you are.
>>That's true, but then when you're down and it's 1 o'clock
in the morning and you're watching linux tutorials
on YouTube and trying to get an open source agent
installed in the DMZ that can be a problem.
>>I think everyone is really looking for something
comprehensive, but simple to use and most of all
centralized, but scaled for their organization.
>>Okay, I'm thinking mostly affordable
but centralized definitely is a big part of it.
You know what we outta do,
let's go through a list of reasons why people out to
consider a monitoring solution.
>>Let's do a top five list.
>>Like what, in the dashboard?
>>Absolutely. >>All right.
>>Number five, apps are connected to networks
and they kinda outta be in the same dashboard.
>>You and I both know that multiple tools are a pain.
People need to save time and get everything in one place.
>>Absolutely true.
Number four your current system is more of a patchwork
than nana's quilt.
>>Aww, nana.
But really, every tool you use adds a certain maintenance
configuration and cost component.
No one ever sets up to build a technology hair ball.
>>Number three, it's good to know when things
break before you get "the phone call."
>>Uh, who wants to get "the phone call?"
And of course "the phone call" is going to be
the VP or the owner calling to see what is going on.
>>Alright, how about number two,
you'd like to sleep a little more.
>>Sleep is absolutely good, but if your phone is vibrating
at one in the morning guess what there is no sleep.
>>And number one it's got to fit the budget.
>>Yes, and that includes not only the tool
but all the time spent configuring.
Remember, you need to factor in your time.
That's your most valuable asset.
>>I have a feeling that a lot of the folks out there
are kind of nodding along with at least three
of those and that tells me they're trying to choose
between a free and a commercial tool.
>>It's not always easy to decide.
So why don't you just show us.
Give us a two minute refresher.
>>Yeah, we can do that.
Alright, so ipMonitor, one of the coolest things about it
first, is that there's nothing really to install except
the tool itself, right?
It has the database built in,
it's got the web server built in
so it's a single executable, just install it and go.
Alright, so this is the main dashboard
page you've seen it a million times
and the key here is to be able to roll up assets
to make them easy to find
that then you apply what are called monitors
to different assets to pull them in, right?
Categorization is key and you'll notice that up here
I have a list of, these are some top devices
the main thing is you'll get into a lot of grouping, right?
So, for example here's the ipMonitor host itself.
So, I've got several different monitors,
if I drill into a particular element
I can see all the component monitors that make up that.
This one here is actually a CPU total, right?
I'm going to get charts and graphs
and they're all organized into that folder structure
so it makes it really easy to know where things are
and sort of map it to your environment.
Most of the time when you're working in it
you'll be inside the device tab or at least when I am
and then I'll start usually in this case
here's broken out by offices so it's sort of
geographically broken out, so inside this office
I've got a couple of pieces of network gear
and I've got a sequel server too so if I want to
I can go in and take a look at the services
that are running on that sequel box.
This is things like drive space, I can see the services
that are running, sequel itself, I get the windows
and memory and some of the other monitors that are
really important to know whether or not that server
is working, but I can also go in and look at some of my
network gear like this switch
and here I can actually see things like ports
but also the CPU memory [mumbles] of the host itself.
And at this level if I drill in
I'm going to get to the configuration
for each one of these monitors.
So, they're different depending on what you're monitoring
and what the type of service is.
But usually they're gonna have things like
the connection configuration information,
you're gonna get things like
timing information that are gonna set the thresholds
for alerts, how they're notified,
you can do things like recovery patterns as well
but what's really nice is you'll see all over the place
these little help buttons,
and if you click on that help button
if you don't understand what something is
it'll take you right to the documentation
open to the place that maps to that feature.
So, it's really handy because a lot of this
is actually learning about what you can monitor
that maybe you hadn't monitored before with a free tool.
>>Really Streamlined.
>>I'm back on the dashboard,
you can see that you can also build maps which are nice,
you can drill into a device on a map
and actually see the details for that element.
And then the other thing a lot of people find really helpful
is reports, and that's one area where a lot of times
free tools just really don't offer anything
and they kind of expect you to be able to do it yourself.
Reports are easy to create,
you've got a bunch of different options
you can run reports locally,
you can build and configure the way that they're displayed
all through the dashboard and again
this is a single executable you just install it
there's no database you're ready to go.
So, as you can see, avocado on toast.
>>You know, what I really like about ipMonitor Patrick
is that the free version and the license version of
ipMonitor are essentially the same.
Now, of course, with the free edition you only get 50
monitors out of the box, but again that's free like beer
not like a puppy.
>>Right, and in fact it's exactly the same
so that the technology's the same,
the selection of monitors is exactly the same.
So, for example if you're running a small business
like maybe a coffee shop with a couple of branches
this very well may be all that you need and
you're going to get the same level of performance
of a customer whose actually using the license version.
And then if you need to grow,
then you just install some more
licenses and you're off and running.
>>Absolutely, I think that's what really makes
ipMonitor perfectly designed for small businesses.
>>Exactly, now of course if you've been watching
a lot of videos from Solarwinds you know we talk a lot
about the Orion Platform so congratulations
that means that you're probably way bigger than you think.
It's also possible that you have a lot more complexity
about what you need to monitor and you need something
that's more powerful.
Let me just do a quick reminder, a couple of screens
of what the Orion platform actually is.
At first glance, they're visually similar
but the main thing here is this scales up
to hundreds of thousands of elements at a global scale
and it lets you really drill way down into specific types
of devices and problems that you're trying to solve.
So for example, there's dedicated views for networking,
I can do things like make network configuration
changes on my devices, I can actually do deep application
monitoring including specific views
for packaged applications, I can configure servers,
deep monitoring for databases, virtualization,
storage management and even
voice to network quality monitoring for phone systems
like Avaya and Cisco.
So again, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this
there are plenty of videos that actually overview this
and again if you were considering the Orion Platform
then probably that's going to be a better fit for you.
>>That makes sense.
You know, I think this was a really fantastic
and informative session on monitoring options
for small business.
And I think nana would be very proud.
>>That seems kind of patchy.
[drums and cymbals play]
>>No patching puns.
>>Too soon?
[upbeat music]