Our management has been clamoring for us to start using our SolarWinds suite of tools to report on 'service' availability. We have always relied on Orion NPM to monitor and report on server uptime but I have struggled on the best way to report on 'services'.
For example, reporting on say, Print, as a service. Would we simply monitor the print spooler service on a print server and report if it stopped? Or how about something like SharePoint portal. Would we use our SAM to monitor a web page and report on its availability?
Currently, we are monitoring the servers that support the service however a LOT of times the server never goes down but the service it supposed might burp. They call fowl since they know there was an interruption but our reporting shows the servers never went down.
I need ideas here Thwackers..... how does one go about monitoring key services, end-to-end, using NPM and SAM????