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CiscoWorks or Orion (SolarWinds)

amorales
Level 1
Level 1

Hi all, We are looking for a product to monitor our Cisco network and Microsoft Servers. Our Network have around 13 Routers and 20 switches on 5 locations, Our Business is prety much Services over the phone and VoIP is one of the most important things to monitor.

I wold like to know your opinion about Cisco Works and Orion. Which one is easier to Install and Maintain, prety much Im the one managing the network and some times I can get help from another guy, Wich package is the apropiated for us based on the size of our network?

Thanks

5 Replies 5

michael.buskin
Level 1
Level 1

Hello,

I am currently using Orion at The King's School in Australia, we monitor over 2000 peripheral devices, including 3 internet routers, 8 Cat4510R Switches and over 1900+ Cisco 2960G Switches.

Orion is a great program, really set and forget, it is fairly easy to maintain, it automatically runs maintenance on your database overnight, averages statistics of your devices after a period you set, Orion runs on SQL Server, which we've implemented into our existing Backup Plan.

Only Downfall of Orion is that it you need to buy an additional polling engine if you're monitoring as many nodes as we are.

Saying that though, I've never used CiscoWorks, we are a Cisco Shop, and have never seen the need to use it.

Hope this answers your question

I am using Nagios to monitor 75+ switches and 100+ servers, its simple to setup and allows custom scripts to monitor applications and services.

If you have any Linux experience I highly recommend it.

I also use nagios to monitor switches, routers,

firewalls and servers as well. In addition

to that, I also use NMIS for bandwidth and CPU

stats for all of our devices. All apps run

on gentoo linux

CCIE Security

Thanks All for the Feed back, Actually We are looking for a Windows running solutiuon, I like Linux a lot, but this monitoring systems needs to be maintened also for other couple peoples, and they dont have linux experience, and we dont have any machine running Linux at all.

Definitely Orion.

Ciscoworks doesn't do servers for one. It also doesn't really give you a nice "dashboard" of whats working and what isn't. Steep learning curve also.

With Orion you can very easily set up everything. Get nice bandwidth graphs , CPU graphs and latency graphs put it on a map to visually display things. It will tell you when things are down and when they come back up. Very nice.

With CW, you can do other things, like archive configurations (which you can do with Cirrus from solarwinds now), deploy IOS upgrades (I think Cirrus might do this too), easily look up what switchport and IP is on, DFM will do more in-depth discovery of problems on devices rather than a simple up/down. CM will allow you to do L2/L3 traceroutes. RME does all kinds of inventory and reporting...

CW will autodiscover your devices while Orion you have to add them manually - yes you can scan a range with Orion, but it doesn't just find them.

We use them both, but I would say if you had to get one to watch your network, Orion would be it definitely. Much easier to set up. Much nicer looking results. I would say much more stable. Nice add-on's too like the Application Monitor and the Netflow stuff is awesome, nothing like it in CW - allows you to see what kind of traffic is going over your links...

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