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Updated September 19, 2017
This article describes the Enterprise Operations Console (EOC) and a general overview of how it works. The main functionality of EOC is to aggregate and display data from distributed SolarWinds instances, also referred to as SolarWinds Sites.
When discussing the Orion suite of products with customers, we often get the question “How does Orion scale?” Customers might have very different reasons for asking this question or different ideas of what scale means to them.
SolarWinds provides multiple methods for customers to scale:
The Enterprise Operations Console (EOC) is the perfect tool to roll up and display data from each instance in a distributed deployment.
In the example below, a worldwide network includes teams that are responsible for managing their respective regions. An Orion Platform installation resides in each region (North America, EMEA, and APAC). EOC aggregates and displays information from all three SolarWinds Sites.
The global NOC or management team can use EOC to access a comprehensive view of all entities, with status and alert information, on a single dashboard. They can also run reports that include information from across the global environment. Administrators can restrict what data each EOC user can see.
For additional information, see this THWACK post.
The Environment Summary resource aggregates information from all SolarWinds Sites. A set of default tiles displays information from all sites, but you can also add custom tiles to display the information most important to you.
Click any status indicator to see the list of entities with that status in the Asset Explorer.
From the Asset Explorer, you can filter or search to locate an entity. Then click the name of the entity to open the SolarWinds Site and display information about that entity on the Details page.
In versions of the Enterprise Operations Console prior to 2.0, EOC contacted remote Orion instances at regular polling intervals and collected all current statistics based on the most recent polls. At each polling interval, large subsets of data were retrieved from the remote sites and stored in the EOC database. Previous versions of EOC never achieved real-time data display, so users did not see current status and alert information.
EOC 2.0 leverages a function called SWIS federation, which executes only the queries necessary to display content on the page being viewed. Federated SWIS allows EOC to pull only the data it needs, when it needs it.
Depicted below is a more technical breakout of this first image. Each instance may contain different products, may be different sizes, and may be geographically dispersed.
With EOC 2.0, remote Orion SWIS services register themselves with EOC's federated SWIS service, thereby exposing their data through a single SWIS interface. When a user/client accesses the website and performs a function, a SWQL query is sent to SWIS on EOC. Here it is analyzed to determine what servers can satisfy the query. SWIS will then exclude any servers that are not necessary, forward the query to the appropriate Orion SWIS instances, combine the results from each, and send the aggregated results back to the client.
This process is completely transparent to the user and is much more efficient than constantly pulling copies of data from each instance into a database, and then running additional queries to provide the results. Federated SWIS performs all the heavy lifting, aggregating the data, and allows EOC to display display live, on-demand data from all monitored SolarWinds Sites.