My last couple of posts on How to Avoid "Monitoring Spam" and How to Monitor Effectively have been received well, and have facilitated some really useful conversation around monitoring and alerting in NPM. For those of you keeping score, I had asked how many people monitor link saturation, and unicast or multicast routing tables. As expected, just about everyone came back with emphatic "yes, yes, doubly yes!" responses to the link saturation question. What was a little surprising to me is how many people aren't monitoring unicast routes. This may be a case where the routing is stable enough, with no redundancy or points where route flaps are likely to occur, but it did catch me off guard a bit.
Not surprisingly, multicast route monitoring seemed to be a corner case for most people. Unless you're in certain industries (stock trading, multi-media streaming, etc.) the reality is that most of us have limited exposure to multicast in the form of a handful of standard addresses (OSPF, RIP, VRRP, etc.) and mostly that takes care of itself.
Today, I'd like to continue with these previous themes and ask for any little tips or tricks that the community has to share. Things that may be obvious to those of us who have used the products for a while, and those things that even a seasoned veteran might not know about are all fair game. Even things that don't completely stay within the Solarwinds product line will work (how many of us have Splunk integrated into our dashboards, for instance?). The goal is to see just how many cool things are being done with NPM that might help the community at large.
The depths of the Orion ecosystem are filled with so many "nerd-knobs" that I'm certain there are hundreds of little things I've personally never seen or touched, but that might prove invaluable to me if I knew about them. Sure, we could all search around on Thwack, but it's a bit like the old joke about needing to know how to spell a word in the dictionary before you can look up how to spell it: we don't necessarily know what to search for. We don't know what we don't know.