http://youtu.be/S5vGJEJwIWE?t=4m28s
As the video snippet says, do your homework.
When researching problems involving incorrect data being shown in Solarwinds, Its important to remember GIGO, or "Garbage In, Garbage Out"
If a device is showing incorrect values, such as HDD size, fan speed, temps, etc and you're using SNMP to poll for monitoring, sometimes you'll end up with failure, not because Orion isn't interpreting the data correctly, but the interface that Orion is getting that data from is giving it garbage in the first place.
Take for example our issues in dealing with very large drives on Linux Servers.
The drive usage percentages were something comically astronomical, 685% or something else ludicrous. It was showing a 48 terabyte drive only being 3 Terabyes size, with 16 terabytes of usage, thus creating a hilariously huge issue for us in our reporting.
Obviously the values on the server are correct, so we Snmpwalk'd the box and lo' and behold, the values that the OID's are showing in the server Mib table are incorrect. So Orion is doing EXACTLY what its supposed to do. Pull the values into the database, compare the values to the flters that exist, and display that information on the Dashboard.
Unfortunately, this vendor-locked box will not be fixed any time soon without some updates from them, so we're just going to have to let the issue sit until it does.
So do your homework, research all possible avenues for where you might be getting bad data, and don't be too quick to shoot the messenger when the note they deliver to you was written by someone else they barely know.
