Community
- Command Central
- MVP Program
- Monthly Mission
- Blogs
- Groups
- Events
- Media Vault
Products
- Observability
- Network Management
- Application Management
- IT Security
- IT Service Management
- System Management
- Database Management
Content Exchange
- SolarWinds Platform
- Server & Application Monitor
- Database Performance Analyzer
- Server Configuration Monitor
- Network Performance Monitor
- Network Configuration Manager
- SQL Sentry
- Web Help Desk
Free Tools & Trials

How do I properly set up an environment with multiple pollers and a lot of agents across many networks?

Hi,

I'm working for a MSP and we put all our customer systems in this SolarWinds environment to keep track on (application) performance and making backups of all Network Devices. But right now it feels like we're hitting a wall with how we should set up things and scale the environment further and I'm looking for some advice from fellow Thwackers.

Currently I'm working with an environment of about 9500 nodes. They're spread out between 6 polling engines and all nodes are configured to be able to connect to all polling engines right now.

The environment has NPM, NCM and SAM (All unlimited licensing). And all polling engines are set up with High Availability.

But I'm not sure how we should continue with the environment in terms of scaling and infrastructure, would it be better to switch up things and let certain devices only connect with 1 poller instead of all pollers?

We also have about 2500 agents which we need have on server initiated communication since we connect to all devices through NAT. But that also seems to lead to disconnected agents when the target server reboots.

Kinda looking for fellow Thwackers who have experience with the same things I'm facing and have successfully found a way to make things work with too much hassle.

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

All comments

vinay.by

Start of with the optimization checklist -

https://documentation.solarwinds.com/en/success_center/orionplatform/content/core-optimization-intro_checklist.htm

If most of these things are already in place that is when we will need to do a deep dive, hope this helps

__PRESENT

decust

I've seen the checklist before and definitely went through it already when we had some bigger performance issues.

The main question is more: what would be wise to do when expanding the environment when monitoring multiple networks? And what fellow Thwackers have experienced with this.

mesverrum

Making it so each node can speak to all pollers makes life much easier from an administrative and failure recovery perspective, and locking them down doesn't seem like it gains you much in terms of benefits?

I always found the agent to be a bit flaky the same way you describe and fortunately didn't have the need to use them very often. Never did find a consistent solution that prevents it from going dead. Usually killing the service and restarting it helps so I've sometimes set up a scheduled task running powershell on the servers I monitored to check the size of the temp directory where the agent stores files and if it is more than a couple GB bounce the service. At the Orion side I also keep dashboards and alerts to make sure I know when an agent goes too long without sending fresh data. I've also found the agents had a pretty high failure rate when it came to HA cutovers and polling engine changes. My colleague told me that he thought it's better in the last 6 months than it was in the past years, but I haven't needed to use many agents lately so I haven't seen that improvement yet myself.