Hello,
Is there anyone out there with experience managing 10+ NPM installations?
I work for a managed service provider and we provided management and monitoring servers to our customers using Solarwinds installations with various modules depending on the client although most clients use NPM and NCM. We use a centralized EOC installation to provide alert rollup and centralized monitoring of all the client environments. Additionally we fire email alerts from each individual client install for incidents such as Node Down, Node Reboot, Packet Loss, etc.
Right now, I don't really have any issues managing the installations although I can see our number of clients growing by 50-100% within the next two years. The way I currently manage the installations involves connecting to a client VPN and then using RDP to access the local server if I need to make any changes that require local access such as configuring the unmanage schedule utility or installing updates. If I need to make any changes through the website, such as adding nodes or configuring alerts, I also VPN into the client environment and access the website.
This current method isn't going to scale very well and I can see the time that I'll spend managing these distributed installs growing and growing thus taking away from time I could spend creating better alert definitions or working with the Orion SDK. So I'm looking for a better way to aggregate monitoring and management of these distributed environments.
One use case would be a way to create a centralized alert manager, if I make changes to an alert I'd like those changes to replicate across the distributed environments without requiring me to log in to each environment and import the alert template.
Another use case would be the ability to deploy Solarwinds product updates and hotfixes without requiring a login to the local server.
Additionally, I'm thinking about some pretty cool stuff leveraging NCM from a centralized point, but that will come later...
Also, before anyone asks, I can't use Active Directory to manage the distributed servers and I also can't use WSUS and/or SCCM.
As far as my capabilities go I have about 3 years of experience with C# and close to 7 years experience with programming in general. I haven't developed advanced programs to interface with Solarwinds aside from some basic SWIS scrapers to grab alerts and node info but I have written a lot of network and database code over the last few years including a client/server library for desktop, mobile and server with non-blocking I/O that supports upwards of 20,000 concurrent clients with less than 500MB of memory and a desktop application that can push configuration changes to multiple devices concurrently. I know I have the technical ability to write something that can accomplish what I want but I just want to be sure that it hasn't been done before.
TL;DR: I have a large number of remote installations and I need an easy way to manage them from a central point. I am proficient in C# and have almost a decade of programming experience. Has any built or bought a solution that can do what I need?