Solarwinds HCO provides easy licensing to customer saying one node one license. Agent based polling is preferred method to fetch the performance metrics. For nodes in cluster Solarwinds does not work very well.
1) For cluster nodes we will need to add cluster and listener ips as individual nodes and will consume separate license. Also the polling with be through agentless protocols like WMI although the agent is present on the physical servers below nods. Our customers have objected to this agentless approach (WMI ports) when they have opted for agent based solution which required only single port to be opened from the servers/nodes to polling engine. And it increases the count of nodes/license where most of the databases have redundancy and contradicts one node one license statement.
2) After polling the data solarwinds should be able to distinguish between active and passive node. It should be able to provide a dashboard where clicking on a clustername provides the underlying nodes and tell the status of those instances.
3) There are tools present like CA nimsoft which handles such kind of functionality well through their cluster probe which in turn decides which is the active node and polls the data only from that through sql probe.
