Does anyone publish or export status of down devices to external systems? If so, what does your solution look like?
We had a working system that must now be redesigned due to a combination of NCM 7.3 upgrade and SSL handshake issues with Linux server that retrieves an NCM report via curl command (separate website bound to another TCP port in IIS). The NCM 7.3 upgrade made the NCM report show only devices down that were assigned to that particular poller. Easy enough to fix, and I ended up recreating this on my additional poller and as long as both reports were retrieved, my issue was a done deal. Since that time though, a new SSL certificate has been installed on our SolarWinds servers and the curl command fails on the SSL handshake with our pollers.
As there's more than one way to skin a cat, I tried to make a report schedule that saved this report on a filesystem. Although not ideal as it executes only once per day instead of every few minutes like I would need to provide semi-realtime information, I planned to fight that in Windows Task Scheduler once SolarWinds Report Scheduler made the job. The issue I'm fighting there is permissions-related. The service accounts I'm trying to use so far have been unable to authenticate or make reports on my SolarWinds server or the network shares I've tried. Potentially that requires logon as batch for this account. A local account on my SolarWinds sever was created for this purpose and has been unable to work in the report scheduler dialog.
I am also considering a batch file that uses pscp and PKI as I already move configs to a Linux server this way. Arguably I would hit the same dilemma where the Linux server is not able to complete SSL handshake with SolarWinds pollers. And I still have to make the down nodes information a file on the filesystem.
I've tried using the DirectLink account solution, although this has not worked. I've considered an alert with an action executed every minute or two--that action being an HTTP post. As this information is already presented to external customers, the lack of encryption was not a concern.
While I ponder which of these solutions is least painful to remedy, I thought I would pose the question to the federal sector folks. Does anyone else make SolarWinds information available to external customers with no AD access? As they say, security isn't supposed to be convenient.