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This is Kevin Weise, SolarWinds® Sales Engineer.
This video will show you how easy it is to install and discover your networks in
about an hour using SolarWinds Orion® Network Performance Monitor.
SolarWinds Orion Network Performance 00:11 Monitor (or NPM), is an advanced network
monitoring system that provides you with fault tolerance,
performance metrics and hardware health statistics for your networking equipment.
NPM has three main components, the web console, which is hosted by Microsoft®
IIS, the database which is installed on Microsoft SQL Server
or SQL Server Express and finally the polling server.
The recommended system requirements to install NPM include:
a SolarWinds polling server using a quad core 3.0GHz or better
processing, 8 GB RAM,
1 GB NIC
Windows® 2008 R2
Server
(64-bit) with IIS installed (running in 32-bit mode)
And finally, a Microsoft .NET 3.5
SP1 and .NET 4.0.
We recommend that you install NPM on its own server.
NPM can be installed on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP2
including R2 (32 or 64 bit versions),
Windows Server 2008 R2 and R2 SP1
and Windows Server 2012.
For the NPM database server, you can use Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Express, Standard or Enterprise,
SQL Server 2008 and 2008
R2 Express, Standard or Enterprise,
or SQL Server 2012 Express, Standard or Enterprise.
While we recommend installing NPM on its own server with the database
hosted on a separate server, for evaluation purposes it is possible to
run NPM and the database on the same server.
For the purposes of this installation demo, we will install Microsoft SQL
Server 2008 R2 SP1 Express.
First you will need to download and extract the NPM Installation zip file to your desktop.
Now, you are ready to start the install.
To begin, simply double-click the installer file
and then click "Run."
The installer will begin to check
for the required components on the server (MSMQ, IIS, .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
and 4.0).
If anything is missing, don't worry, the installer will install it and configure it for you.
If you get a pop up message notifying you that a component is missing, just click
"Install."
After the missing components
are installed, the NPM install wizard will start.
Enter your valid email address and click "Continue".
Help us make NPM even better, by clicking the "Yes, Send Data" button
on the Help SolarWinds Improve window.
Otherwise, click "No."
At the welcome screen for the install wizard
opens, click "Next" to continue.
Select your language and then click "Next."
If IIS isn't already installed, the installer will notify you.
You have the option of suspending the installation to manually install IIS, or
you can let the installer install and configure it for you.
For this demo I'm going to stay with the recommended option to "Continue with Orion
Installation."
Read the end user license agreement then check the box to accept the terms of the EULA.
Click "Next."
Select your install location.
After you've specified the installation directory, click "Next."
Select your installation type. The Express install will install both NPM
and Microsoft SQL
2008 R2 Express
on your evaluation server.
Selecting the Advanced Install allows you to use an existing database server.
For this demo, I'll perform an Express Install.
Click "Next."
The install wizard is ready to copy files. Click "Next"
If you opted to have NPM install IIS that process will begin now.
The Configuration Wizard will
create the NPM database,
the NPM web console and the SolarWinds services necessary for NPM to operate.
This is the last step in the installation of NPM.
When the Configuration Wizard finishes,
click "Finish."
At the login screen for the NPM web console, click "Login."
Let's start monitoring devices with NPM.
The Network Sonar Wizard assists you with discovering and adding devices from your network.
NPM uses industry standard network management protocols to
monitor devices.
The first screen of the Network Sonar Wizard allows you to enter the SNMP community
string or strings you have configured on your network devices.
NPM already has public and private
community strings
defined by default. It is important that you add your community string to this list. NPM uses SNMP
to identify your devices and to poll them for utilization statistics.
Without the correct community string, NPM won't be able to access your
devices.
Add your string by clicking the "Add New Credential" link right here next to the
green plus.
When the discovery wizard runs, it will try the SNMP community strings in the
order they are listed.
Move the most used string to the top of the list by clicking the up arrow
for that string until it's at the top position. Once you have your community
strings added, click "Next."
NPM will monitor utilization information from your VMware environment and can pull
this data from either your vCenter server
or from your ESX or ESXi hosts directly.
If you want to include your VMware
environment in NPM, check the "Poll for VMware" and add your vCenter or ESX credentials.
Once you have them added, click "Next."
NPM also includes the ability to monitor your Windows servers via SNMP or WMI.
If your Windows servers are configured for SNMP
and you included their community string in the SNMP list, you can just click "Next" through this
section.
If you don't have your Windows servers configured for SNMP and you want to monitor
them with WMI, you can enter Windows credentials here by clicking
"Add New Credentials."
After you've added your credentials, click "Next."
The Network Selection allows you to define the areas of your network to
scan for devices.
You can specify a range of IP addresses, particular subnets, a seed router
or a list of IP addresses to scan.
For this example, we'll define a range of IP addresses.
Once you define your range, click "Next."
The Discovery Settings allow you to modify timeouts and retries if your scan will go across
higher latency segments of your network.
Default settings should be fine for this discovery.
Discovery Scheduling allows you run a discovery job once or on a scheduled basis.
Set your frequency and click "Discover." The discovery job will run through the the specified IP
addresses discovering your nodes
and returning results so that you can
import them into NPM.
The Network Sonar Results Wizard will show a list of Device Types to import. De-select any devices types you
you don't want to monitor with NPM
and click "Next."
On the Select Interfaces to Import for Monitoring screen,
select the properties of the interfaces want to monitor
with NPM.
You can select interfaces by their status, port type and hardware type.
You can also create advanced filtering options
to include or exclude interfaces.
Let's create an advanced filter to exclude all Loopback interfaces.
For this demo, we will select "Interface Type" in the first drop down list
and then "does not contain any keywords" from the second list.
Finally, we will enter "Loopback" as the keyword in the text box
Click the
"Reselect Interfaces" button. Notice that all of the Loopback interfaces are no longer selected. Once
you're done, click "Next."
The Volume Types to Import page allows you select or deselect the
volume types to monitor.
Make your selections and click "Next."
The Import Preview section will present the list of devices that are ready to be imported.
Uncheck any devices you don't want to monitor.
When you are ready, click "Import."
Once the import is complete, the results will be displayed.
Click "Finish."
And now, NPM gets right to work polling your imported devices.
With NPM installed and configured, you are now monitoring the response time,
availability
and performance statistics of your routers, switches and other SNMP-enabled
devices.
You can quickly check the status of your devices on the
NPM Summary page in the "All Nodes" section.
For more information on NPM and all of our other great products,
visit www.solarwinds.com.