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Distributed Implementation of SolarWinds

Greetings !!!

Sorry if this topic is already present, I did go over the existing stuff but had some more questions and needed some guidance. We have SAM(Unlimited) & NPM(2000) licenses, my company has a global presence and wanted to work on the implementation plan to have a efficient monitoring environment keeping future growth in consideration. I was thinking of following scenarios:

- 1 SAM server (This will have alert central & web console)

- 1 NPM server ( this will also have Netflow, Config Manager & IPSLA)

- 1 SQL Ent ( NPM & SAM both point to this)

- Have poller engines for SAM ( I believe since i do not have unlimited license for NPM I cannot have multiple pollers right ???)

Can you share you experience with the above architecture or share your thoughts on a what would work better instead. Couple of more questions:

- Can NPM & SAM point to the same SQL or they need their own, what is preferable

- How to decide on how many poller engines we need and how to scale, what are the considerations ?

- Are there any white papers or references on implementations in other organizations or best practices ?

Thanks for your help !!!!

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aLTeReGo

- 1 SAM server (This will have alert central & web console)
- 1 NPM server ( this will also have Netflow, Config Manager & IPSLA)
- 1 SQL Ent ( NPM & SAM both point to this)
- Have poller engines for SAM ( I believe since i do not have unlimited license for NPM I cannot have multiple pollers right ???)

I would recommending installing NPM and SAM on the same server(s) so you can have the single pane of glass view into both network/servers/applications/etc. If you do decide to install SAM and NPM onto seperate servers, keep in mind that they cannot share the same database. They can share the same database server, but not the same database. Which means the only way to acheive a single pane of glass view would be through the use of the Enterprise Operations Center (EOC). Since you own a SAM ALX (Unlimited License) you can leverage the additional pollers for NPM as well as SAM. Though you will still be limited to a maximum of 2000 monitored SNMP interfaces provided by your NPM SL2000 license.

- Can NPM & SAM point to the same SQL or they need their own, what is preferable

Yes, both NPM and SAM can share the same SQL Server, but when installed on separate machines they cannot use the same database. It's generally preferred to install SAM and NPM on the same machine, using the same database to provide a single pane of glass.

- How to decide on how many poller engines we need and how to scale, what are the considerations ?

This is typically determined by how many components/elements/etc are being monitored. For a full list of poller capacity drivers please read the Scalability Engine Guidelines document. You can also keep an eye on your polling completion rate under [Settings -> Polling Engines] to determine the load on your polling engine

Polling Rate.png

- Are there any white papers or references on implementations in other organizations or best practices ?

There are various references in each products Administrators Guide as well as Blog Posts, Product Blogs, videos, webcasts, and expansion guides that cover different deployment scenarios and provide best practice recommendations.

mphalak

Awesome, thanks for your response alterego.....this gives me a good place to start with. One more question: I was thinking on installing SAM and NPM on seperate servers in order to distribute the load that will generat due to polling, with having both on one server would all the polling affect the performance of the server and how do you handle this in your case any suggestions/thoughts on this ? would you just add more pollers in this case ?

Thanks Again!!

waka13

Adding more pollers completely depends on how big your environment is the amount of data you plan on collecting and at what frequency. For example our environment has 1 primary poller with SAM & NPM installed with 9 additional pollers where 2 are in DMZs. All of the pollers outside of the DMZs have a range of 3500 Elements - 8900 Elements for NPM. The DMZ pollers have about 500 or so because there are less nodes in the DMZs. Our pollers are Windows Server 2008 R2 with 12GB of Ram and Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E7-4870 @2.4GHz.

We have distributed the nodes across all of the servers we have roughly about a thousand nodes on each server collecting basic NPM data at semi frequent intervals. We also have Several thousand SAM elements we use for application team specific monitoring and data collection each one of these intervals is roughly at 300 seconds with a few exceptions here and there.

our most utilized server has about 8500 NPM Elements, 1200 nodes, 346 interfaces, 6881 Volumes, 9332 SAM elements and its CPU utilization holds steady at about 53% and Ram around 70%. Our NPM Rate is roughly 67% and SAM rate is 70% so we still have some room to grow on that poller (this is an additional poller). So depending on your poller and how frequent you poll and the amount of elements you should be able to add quite a bit to a server. Also since the primary poller does a lot of DB calls we try and keep more load on the additional pollers to help alleviate any load off of that server.

I hope this helps

aLTeReGo

One more question: I was thinking on installing SAM and NPM on seperate servers in order to distribute the load that will generat due to polling, with having both on one server would all the polling affect the performance of the server and how do you handle this in your case any suggestions/thoughts on this ? would you just add more pollers in this case ?

I would not be concerned about distributing the load, as you should not have any issue polling the full capacity of your licenses with a single poller. When and if the time comes and you've exceeded the polling capacity, it is generally preferred by users to add an additional poller, then to split services across multiple servers with separate databases that must be maintained as nodes are added/removed. It's also much easier to manage and maintain a single alert engine, and centralize reporting. Not to mention the integration with groups and dependencies that are lost when these two products are installed on separate servers.

dc_san

waka13 - what kind of horsepower does your sql backend server have? Are all of your additional pollers on your LAN?

The region I work in currently has a solarwinds config consisting of a main orion server (NPM,SAM,NTA), additional poller, seperate web server and a dedicated SQL server. We have two other regions that we want to utilize solarwinds for - one that has 1gb metro e connection two 1Gb direct fiber links for connectivity to my region that has around 500 servers and the other site currently at 100mb (very soon to be 1gb) connection to my region that has about 100 servers. I trying to determine if putting an additional poller at each site for server and application monitoring would be the answer.... Thanks in advance for any info.

dusty