How to choose best polling method while adding new nodes

Hi Team,

I am planning to add more nodes to our SolarWinds environment in a few days. I am a little bit confused about choosing the best polling method for the different types of nodes I am going to add.

I want to monitor only disk, RAM, and CPU utilization for the nodes mentioned below. Please refer to the snapshot for details about the nodes I am going to add.

Kindly suggest how to decide our polling method and identify node types. Is my selection of polling methods correct as shown in the screenshot?

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Accepted answers

marcrobinson

You have it correctly - assuming that you have NPM and SAM or HCO. Agent/WMI is the preferred method for windows - just pick one. For Linux based servers, you can use snmp or agents (see link below). F5 load balancers do have special monitoring tools in solarwinds. See those links below for usage and applicability. The additional F5 monitoring may be overkill for cpu load/memory usage - but it is worth evaluating.

Agent versus Agentless: This comes down to preference and "requirements." The preference is that the agents (for windows or linux) will get you the same data. You will need to maintain the agents though. The other requirements include things like security and your network mandates. WMI is often looked as a security issue. If you use SNMP - try to use V3 and not V2 as V3 is encrypted. The flip side - I already mentioned that you have to take care of agents. Upgrading, deploying and troubleshooting them can be a hassle, even with multiple deployment methods. Also the agent management services tend to have issues if you add/move over 25 agents at a time per polling engine.

Linux Agents

Deploy SolarWinds Platform Agents manually to a Linux/Unix-based computer

Network Insight for F5 BIG-IP load balancers in NPM (solarwinds.com)

F5 health monitors in NPM (solarwinds.com)

All comments

marcrobinson

Linux Agents

Deploy SolarWinds Platform Agents manually to a Linux/Unix-based computer

Network Insight for F5 BIG-IP load balancers in NPM (solarwinds.com)

F5 health monitors in NPM (solarwinds.com)

ImNishat

Oh Sorry,

I forget to mentioned our modules which we are using in the SolarWinds environment. We are using NPM and NTA.

admin_nsn

I definitely prefer WMI polling over the SolarWinds agent. As far as I know the SolarWinds agent is running with system privileges, with no way of modifying the permissions it's running with. With WMI you're in full control over which permissions a polling engine is having to your devices via the account being used. Also, the requirements for the agent as you mention including, updating, maintaining, .NET 4.8 requirement for polling and more. While WMI mostly just works out of the box.

I've never used the agent for Linux servers, so I cannot comment on that part.

marcrobinson

I agree with your assessment of the agents on windows. Unfortunately, provisioning wmi permissions creates its own headaches too. Usually that is a one and done for each version, but still - why did Microsoft even think that Admin rights were a good idea for their core management instrumentation?

marcrobinson

Hmm just saw this. Good recommendations on discovery and it refers to NPM.

Discover your network with NPM (solarwinds.com)

Add discovered devices to NPM (solarwinds.com)

This is a nice NPM chart on monitoring:

What should I monitor on my network? (solarwinds.com)

I looked over NPM, as it used to focus on snmp devices and network metrics, not the server side so much. Looks like you can get CPU, Memory, and Disk now, which is what you are looking for. NPM also includes the Universal Device poller for SNMP. That is a very powerful and useful tool for snmp metric collection. The other tool is the custom device poller.

Forecast capacity for nodes, interfaces, or volumes in NPM (solarwinds.com)

marcrobinson

Also, NTA is underrated as a tool. Combine NTA with Netpath (part of NPM) and you have some very useful and quick to deploy tools. The QOE agent is one of the few agent tools that is also very useful. It is essentially wireshark-lite that you install on a node and can target specific application traffic.

NetPath requirements for NPM (solarwinds.com)

Monitor QoE applications and nodes (solarwinds.com)

Add perfstack and modern dashboards - and you get an instant NOC.

ImNishat

I have added my Windows nodes using Agents, but now I am getting the below errors. What should I do, after installing agents we restarted the system.

We want to monitor, DISK, CPU and RAM Status only on the agent SW installed systems. We are using NPM and NTA modules in our environments.

admin_nsn

Did you make sure to install the agent with admin privileges and does the server have .NET 4.8 installed? This is pre-requisites

ImNishat

Yes, Now it's solved. But it's take time.