Building DevOps dashboard using SolarWinds and Opserver

It's been a long time since I've started using Opserver - a monitoring system by the team at Stack Exchange. Opserver gives you a great overview of what's going on with your company's infrastructure, I am still really amazed by it's simplicity and the feature set.

Unfortunately, there is no "wallboard" mode in it, which could be used to show most important metrics at a single screen. So today I'll show how to use OpServer as an API for SolarWinds, and build DevOps dashboards in minutes, simply by accessing existing classes.


In brief, all you need to access SolarWinds data from your app is to:

1. Add references to Opserver and Opserver.Core 
2. Add required sections to the App.config file
3. Place /Config folder to the output folder.

The step #1 is self-explanatory, so I'll start from #2 - just add the following lines after the opening <configuration> section:

	<configSections>
	<section name="Settings" type="StackExchange.Opserver.SettingsSection, StackExchange.Opserver.Core" />
	<section name="SecuritySettings" type="StackExchange.Opserver.SecuritySettings, StackExchange.Opserver.Core" />
	<section name="Exceptional" type="StackExchange.Exceptional.Settings, StackExchange.Opserver.Core" />
	</configSections>
	<SecuritySettings configSource="Config\SecuritySettings.config" />
	<Settings name="JSON" provider="JSONFile" path="~\Config\" />
	<Exceptional applicationName="Status">
	<ErrorStore type="Memory" />
	</Exceptional>

view raw app.config.xml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The only config file that needs to be placed in the /Config directory is standard DashboardSettings.json containing connection string to the SolarWinds database. Here's the sample code:

	"providers": [
	{
	"name": "Orion",
	"type": "Orion",
	"host": "monitorXd1:8686",
	"connectionString": "Data Source=monitorXd1;Initial Catalog=SolarWindsOrion;User ID='SolarWindsOrionDatabaseUser';Password='put the password here';Timeout=10"
	}
	]

view raw DashboardSettings.json hosted with ❤ by GitHub

After it, you can start using the API's, for example get all nodes and start playing: 

var allNodes = DashboardData.AllNodes.Where(s => !s.IsUnwatched).Where(s => s.CPULoad >= 0 || s.MemoryUsed >= 0).ToList();

I've pushed sample project to GitHub, it contains simple console app which outputs the following:

	var allNodes = DashboardData.AllNodes.Where(s => !s.IsUnwatched).Where(s => s.CPULoad >= 0 || s.MemoryUsed >= 0).ToList();
	var downNodes = allNodes.Where(x => x.Status == NodeStatus.Down);
	Thread.Sleep(3000);
	float inBps = 0;
	float outBps = 0;
	var totalRam = 0.0;
	var totalDisk = 0.0;
	foreach (var node in allNodes)
	{
	// Let's get the metrics from VM hosts only
	if (!node.IsVMHost)
	{
	continue;
	}
	foreach (var i in node.PrimaryInterfaces)
	{
	inBps += i.InBps.HasValue ? i.InBps.Value : 0;
	outBps += i.OutBps.HasValue ? i.OutBps.Value : 0;
	}
	totalRam += node.TotalMemory.HasValue ? node.TotalMemory.Value : 0;
	totalDisk += node.Volumes.Sum(volume => volume.Size.HasValue ? volume.Size.Value : 0);
	}
	inBps = inBps / 1024 / 1024;
	outBps = outBps / 1024 / 1024;
	totalRam = totalRam / 1024 / 1024 / 1024;
	totalDisk = totalDisk / 1024 / 1024 / 1024;
	Console.WriteLine(string.Format("You have {0} servers", allNodes.Count()));
	Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} of them are down", downNodes.Count()));
	Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Network Upload: {0:0.00} MB", inBps));
	Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Network Download: {0:0.00} MB", outBps));
	Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Total RAM: {0:0.00} GB", totalRam));
	Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Total HDD: {0:0.00} GB", totalDisk));

view raw Program.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Similar code can be used to build something like this:

You can also output active alerts and many other things. If you come up with some interesting ideas - please share them!