A fast-growing Managed Service Provider (MSP) found itself in the middle of a massive transformation, retiring thousands of aging analog POTS lines and replacing them with modern VOIP-based services. The success of that shift depended on a fleet of DataRemote devices deployed across customer sites, serving as the last link that kept critical communications alive.
But as the network evolved, visibility became a major obstacle. The MSP’s existing SolarWinds platform could monitor routers, switches, and firewalls flawlessly, yet it couldn’t see what was happening inside the DataRemote layer, the heartbeat of the new VOIP infrastructure. When a device went offline or a port failed, there was no reliable alert, no way to confirm health or performance in real time.
The challenge was urgent and complex: build a way to see, understand, and trust the state of every DataRemote device across a rapidly changing network, without replacing SolarWinds.
November 2024
IT Services
Operational Excellence
At THIRD SPECTRUM, we engineered a robust solution that combined event-driven telemetry with API-based validation, giving the MSP complete visibility across all DataRemote devices without relying on SNMP. The project’s success hinged on three goals: reliable event ingestion, scalable API interaction, and seamless SolarWinds integration.
Our approach started by analyzing how SolarWinds consumes data, primarily through SNMP and WMI polling, and contrasting it with how DataRemote exports information via webhooks and REST APIs. We designed a middleware layer to translate between the two paradigms, effectively teaching SolarWinds how to “speak” DataRemote.
This approach not only satisfied the immediate need for DataRemote monitoring but also created a reusable framework for onboarding other non-SNMP vendor integrations in the future.
We implemented a hybrid monitoring framework that fused event-driven telemetry and API validation into SolarWinds, allowing DataRemote devices to appear as natively monitored CPEs.
A middleware service was developed to receive DataRemote “sevhooks” in real time. This landing zone parsed, normalized, and logged each event, then queued them for SolarWinds ingestion. To ensure reliability, the service used idempotent processing and retry queues, eliminating duplicate records and minimizing event loss. Events such as “Ethernet WAN down” or “FXS port active” were reflected instantly in the MSP’s dashboards.
Periodic API polling was added to verify device states and catch any missed webhook updates. The polling intervals were dynamically managed to remain within vendor throttling limits while still ensuring data freshness. When discrepancies arose, the system corrected statuses automatically, creating a self-healing monitoring loop.
A custom SolarWinds Application Monitor (SAM) template was designed to query the middleware via REST API. Each DataRemote device appeared in SolarWinds as a monitored “application object,” with port, WAN, and FXS states mapped to component monitors. This enabled full use of existing SolarWinds capabilities, alerting, SLA tracking, dashboards, and historical trend reporting without any SNMP dependencies.
The middleware stack was deployed in redundant containers with active health probes, ensuring uptime and performance under heavy load. Message queues persisted across restarts, and distributed workers handled polling at scale, allowing hundreds of DataRemote devices to be monitored simultaneously.
The impact was immediate and measurable. MSP engineers and customers alike gained real-time visibility into their DataRemote endpoints, something previously considered impossible within SolarWinds.
Live device and port health appeared in standard SolarWinds dashboards, alongside routers, firewalls, and switches.
Missed webhook events were eliminated thanks to dual verification from the API polling mechanism.
No additional portals or tools were needed; everything lived within the familiar SolarWinds interface, streamlining NOC workflows.
The framework scaled effortlessly across hundreds of devices while staying well below DataRemote’s API rate limits.
Beyond the operational success, the project served as a proof of concept for extending SolarWinds monitoring to non-SNMP devices. The combination of event ingestion, API validation, and SAM integration provided a template for future vendor integrations, empowering MSPs to unify visibility across diverse ecosystems.
Extremely Complex
API, C#, DataRemote, Docker, dotnet, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Sevhook, Solarwinds Orion, SolarWinds SAM, Webhook
