I’ve been experimenting with another custom dashboard inside SolarWinds, this time looking at the polling estate itself.
The idea was to bring two questions into one view:
how is the monitored estate distributed across the pollers?
how fresh is the data across their monitoring categories?
Naturally, a few moving particles found their way into it 😂
Each logical polling engine on the left has four independent connections across the dashboard: Nodes, Interfaces, Volumes and SAM component monitors.
The colours and animation speeds reflect each category’s freshness assessment. Current categories move normally, Review and Degraded categories move progressively slower, while Unknown or unassigned scope stays static. The movement is a visual cue for that assessment, rather than a measurement of polling speed or traffic.
The overview brings together the estate totals, native polling completion and category freshness coverage. Selecting an individual poller then brings its own scope into focus.
Selecting a polling engine
Clicking an engine on the left highlights its four connections and dims the others, making its contribution much easier to follow.
- The centre switches to that poller’s NPM element count, native polling completion and poller evidence posture, including the information supporting that assessment.
- The right switches to its assigned Nodes, Interfaces, Volumes and SAM component monitors, with their respective freshness coverage.
- Clicking the selected engine again, clicking the flow background or pressing Escape returns to the estate view.
The selection uses information already loaded into the dashboard, so switching between pollers does not run another database query.
One distinction I wanted to preserve is that polling completion and data freshness answer different questions. A high completion figure can sit alongside lower freshness coverage in an individual category. Volume coverage also specifically reflects LastSync synchronisation recency
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