I've been reviewing licensing to monitor Azure with SAM. This is with per-node licensing for SHO Essentials.
As I understand it, SAM can monitor Azure via the Azure API. Thus my initial thinking was onboarding Azure monitor would consume a single node license and this would return everything possible such as all the Azure assets (compute, database, storage etc), simple performance metrics (eg CPU / RAM / network usage for each compute instance), events, costs etc.
What I find confusing is this page:
https://documentation.solarwinds.com/en/success_center/sam/content/sam-api-poller-licensing.htm
Node-based
If you have a node-based SAM license:
Each node with at least one API-monitored metric counts as a managed SAM node.
A SAM node can host multiple API pollers.
Regardless of how many metrics are consumed by API pollers, you can monitor an unlimited number of component monitors if using node-based licensing.
For example, with a node-based SAM10 license, you can monitor API metrics up on up to 10 nodes with either:
- Monitor 100 values with 1 API poller on 1 node, or
- Monitor 50 values with 2 API pollers on 1 node, or
- Diversify license consumption, as follows:
- Monitor 10 values with 1 API poller on 3 nodes,
- Monitor 20 values with 1 API poller on 1 node, and
- Monitor 10 values with 5 API pollers on 1 node.
In this example, 30 + 20 +50 = 100 consumed SAM licenses.
Where does the API metrics and values come from? A metric to me is an individual value, for instance CPU utilisation on a single server.
So if you had 50 compute instances in Azure you wanted to monitor via the API, is that 1 node license regardless? Or do you have to start counting what metrics you want to see (based on the examples of 100 values with 1 poller on 1 node)?
Where does the 100 value limit come from on a SAM10 license?
Or does none of this apply if using per-node on SHO?
Thanks!
