We had to learn toВ be flexible with it to meet people's needs, but having clearer goals from the outset would have made it easier and quickerВ in the long run. We would set up theВ alerting and monitoring and then three months later somebody would come up from an executive level and say, 'Hey, we need to monitor this as well.' So, we would have to make some changes just like any project. We would have a plan and aВ direction and head down a path to implement those particular types of solutions. We started out with an implementation strategy, but there were some challenges when ourВ directions got changed on us by senior leadership. We have still got a lot more work to do though. I think the way we handle it now hasВ really helped usersВ mature in that way.

People were not paying attention to alerts. We were using Homegrown, Nagios, and Check_MK. Only after that declaration of successВ were we able to get on toВ monitoring and dissemination of information to various users and get started with the monitoring.В But our monitoring is a lot better than what it used to be. I think it took us a little over a year-and-a-half to actually declare success on the project. Overall we got involved inВ a year-long project where we were meeting on a weekly basis discussing all the issues. Once you have got a template set up, you can pretty much populate that information to the Orion database, but I mean there is some pain to get started off. The way that I found it to be complexВ was that we had to do a lot of our own scripting to collect the data that we needed. We found that it was easier just to go ahead and do our own. They do haveВ templates in there that you can utilize, but most of those you are going to have to customize anyways. The initial setup with Orion was somewhat complex. That might makeВ it a little bit more easy to generate other reports that follow the way you like to do things. They do have some templates that you can use for report setup.В It would be nice if you could maybeВ make your own. You are a littleВ limited on the information available on that front and the utility could be improved.

For example, the filtering system and formatting reports and things like that seem to have room for improvement. But the product seems to be missing some depth in that area and itВ leaves a little bit to be desired. There may beВ some things that they could improveВ in the reporting aspect of the product.В You can create custom reports and those types of things. I do not really have other suggestions for additional features beyond working on the development of DPA to make it a more complete tool.В We are still learning the product. That is the only thing I have run into so far with the product that seems to be a shortfall. In talking to the DBA's, there was a lot of functionality that they were just used to and they hadВ issues because they did not see some things that they thought were important but missingВ in the DPA product. It is an Oracle product calledВ OEMВ (Oracle Enterprise Manager). But in talking to the DBA, they like another product that they want toВ use for the database monitoring. We were looking at using DPA (Database Performance Analyzer) which is another component of the NPMВ and that looks like it takes care of anВ area we had not really dove into yet. We have the network and we areВ responsible for set up and monitoring of those particular tools. This is the actual operations monitoring piece of it. What I am mostly referring to is not the whole Network Performance Monitor suite. We are just now getting more into monitoring databases and a broader scope ofВ applications as well. There isВ an application that has been spawned from that, but mostly our monitoring is for up/downtime, space, memory, availability, and those types of things critical for performance analysis. We are working with one applicationВ now for COVID-19. You have all these applications like Banner and Canvas and other web-based applications that get used by particular areas. For example,В we have the school public health, and we have the school of nursing and they have different needs. We were going through a maturation process propagating the monitoring of applications throughout the server policy here at the university.В It was moreВ to monitor various applications that are primarily used for individual schools. Our installation is on-premises on a virtual machine.В When we purchased NPM I was particularly interested in the features ofВ Orion.

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