There may already be posts on Thwack talking about this, but from my quick searches I didn't find anything. The Orion DPA module has identified 16,827 client relationships in our environment when we hit the "Find New Relationships" button... Yikes! Unfortunately, I can't just select all of them and add them in because I don't trust everything in there. It seems to think that any server that communicates with a SQL server should have a relationship mapped to it. The problem with that is that just because something talks to a SQL server doesn't mean it actually depends on that SQL server and thus I don't want to map a relationship to it.
The biggest example I can find is that it wants to map our Orion Polling Engines and the application monitors we have assigned to our polling engines (like the Orion Server application Template, AppInsight for IIS on our Primary Polling engine, and so on) to every single database server those polling engines monitor. DPA thinks just because Orion is monitoring the databases that we should now define a relationship between them. That's nuts. DPA has found almost 200 relationships just between our Primary Polling engine and various databases. Our 7 other polling engines each have between 50 and 100 found relationships showing in DPA.
My two biggest problems are thus:
- With 16,827 relationships found, it's not like I can just spend a few minutes browsing through the list and selecting the actual relationships we want to monitor. There is just way too many of them. How am I supposed to make sense of this?
- There is no way to ignore a relationship so that it no longer shows up in the list. If I could at least filter out the relationships I will never want to see, I could maybe get this list down to a more reasonable size to then browse through and validate what's left.
Does anyone have any tips on how you manage these discovered Client Relationships in DPA? Am I missing something obvious that would make this easier? And to any SolarWinds employees that may see this post; are there plans to make whatever algorithm that drives the "Find New Relationships" feature smarter so that it doesn't identify all of these false positives? Just because something is talking to a database doesn't mean it depends on it and needs to be mapped. I hope there is a better way.
