1. My company exists of 3 Headquarters call centers and 400 stores. When I first got hired on...we had Solarwinds Orion monitoring one core switch. Ahem. Really? You have this tool to monitor your devices...but you don't use it? It took it on...
2. How did Solarwinds save my bacon? Here we go:
NPM - Now that we have added all of our nodes to Solarwinds...my networking team now knows what is going on network wide instead of waiting for the complaint.
Syslog and Traps - OMG! How can one live without these. With Syslog, I have detected issues associated with equipment failovers, failed authentication attempts, and failed DAI occurances. One stop shop...
Traps - actually found rogue sotftware on the network scanning for printers. The issue was benign...faulty setup. Would have never have found it without SW.
Processor Utilization - We have identified issues such as layer 2 loops and misconfigurations by getting the processor snapshot.
Interface Errors - huge lack of quality abatement here. Somebody on the team installed a router on a 100Mbps circuit...but it negotiated to Half-Duplex. Seeing the interface errors in SW, I found the issues.
Universal Device Poller - My helpdesk guys needing to troubleshoot SSL-VPN had issues knowing whether or not we had expended the license. Not a problem anymore. They get a "graph" on demand.
NTA - With the addition of QoS and bandwidth utilization...I have definately been able to identify issues. I actually have used NTA to tell me if I have undesirable traffic drops, etc. Been great!
NCM - I have roughly 720 devices. 90 day password changes were a week process. Now...20 minutes.
3. The company had purchased Solarwinds prior to my arrival. However, they were not USING Solarwinds. We are using the heck out of it now!
4. Solarwinds has kept me busy. Why? Because it is an indispensible tool to our environment. We have 100% situational awareness (with the exception of IPv6...we are waiting for those enhancements from SW).