Impact on Solarwinds database for creating large number of Dynamic Groups

Hi,

I was wondering what is the impact to Solarwinds and its database when large number of dynamic groups are created? We have over 600 dynmic groups in our Solarwinds. Also we have defined dependencies for each of these groups. After we created them all, I find the Orion interface became slow. The pages are taking longer to load.

Can anyone tell me if the large number of dynamic groups and dependencies have any impact on Solarwinds performance. Did anyone of you tried creating these many groups in your environment?

Thanks you

Zubair

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mesverrum

Zubair,

Dynamic group definitions absolutely do impact the performance of the application. Depending on your hardware when you get into several hundred dynamic groups it can really crush the performance of NPM.

At this time the best solutions I have seen were to either reduce the frequency that Orion refreshes the groups or to just not build as many of them. Also static groups tend to have a much lower impact on the system as they are not constantly re-evaluating all the nodes to see if they fall into the group but they add in administrative overhead of keeping up with changes manually.

In many cases I work with people who will have many groups just listing out the devices at each particular site, where it would be more resource efficient just to set up an "All Nodes" resource grouped by a "Site" custom property or similar schemes. In many cases you can use custom properties to accomplish much of what people use groups for without the performance impact. And from my experience the menus for manipulating custom properties are way faster to work with than groups.

-Marc Netterfield

Loop1 Systems: SolarWinds Training and Professional Services

LinkedIN: Loop1 Systems
Facebook: Loop1 Systems
Twitter: @Loop1Systems

zubairaltaf

Thank you for your reply.

We have over 200 stores and those store contains multiple network nodes and servers. We need this grouping not just for showing them per store basis but also for dependencies. Each store has a core switch/router which is the parent for all other devices in that store. Using the custom properties as you mentioned, I don't see a way of how to defining these dependencies.

We do use custom properties for nodes for other purposes mainly for filtering.

You mentioned about reducing the frequency of Orion refreshing the groups, can you please tell me how I can achieve that? I couldn't a find a way of doing it from Orion GUI.

Also if you can tell me where does this refreshing/re-evaluation of the nodes for groups happens? does it happens at main polling engine or at database level? does adding more additional polling engine distribute the load for refreshing groups?

Thanks

Zubair

mesverrum

Yeah, the only way to do dependencies is with groups.

The group status update is under Manage Groups>Edit Group>Advanced

I do not believe that additional pollers will help with the group status workload but I've never really tested that idea. I believe the majority of that load falls to the core application server and a small amount of added SQL queries going to the db, at least that's how it has looked when I have had problems with the groups in the past.

-Marc Netterfield

Loop1 Systems: SolarWinds Training and Professional Services

LinkedIN: Loop1 Systems
Facebook: Loop1 Systems
Twitter: @Loop1Systems

zubairaltaf

Thanks for your response.

Changing the refresh frequency for over 600 groups from GUI will be time consuming.

Have you tried updating the group properties using Orion SDK? I used Orion SDK to create those groups but couldn't find a simplest way to update those frequency from powershell.

Regards

Zubair