NTA and MS SQL 2K16

nbs

I dont suspose this decision is likely to be reversed? My issue is that now to upgrade to 4.4 I need to go and request a budget for SQL licensing or stay stuck on 4.3 for the forseable future.

In my view MS SQL just adds to the cost of the product (which, whilst Solarwinds is a strong and good product and one I do recommend, its not a cheap solution to begin with), I understand Solarwinds does say that NPM and NTA can share the same MS SQL DB to me this feels like its a step back and that the performance overhead for NTA has been added back into the DB for NPM.

Ideally it would be great if Solarwinds could consider moving to an appliance based approach running on linux/mysql making it easier to deploy and (for us admins anyway) maintain and cut the dependency on MS products.

Regards

Nigel

jreves

nbs​, in NTA 4.4 and going forward, we're making use of new columnstore technology available in MS SQL to store and retrieve our flow records. That technology isn't available in older versions of SQL, so supporting older versions isn't an option.

In previous versions of the product, we've required an additional, dedicated database server for flow storage. In 4.4, we've eliminated that requirement - reducing your footprint and the expense of running that extra server. As you need an MS SQL instance already to host the Orion DB, we're supporting co-locating the Orion and NTA Flow Storage DB's in the same SQL instance - provided that instance supports the columnstore technology.

Note that this is not moving the flow data into the Orion DB. NPM and NTA do not share the same database for flow storage. Rather, this is a separate DB that can reside within the the same SQL instance as the Orion DB. NTA builds a completely separate database for flow storage.

There's some good information available in the FAQs, here:

NTA 4.4 Adoption: Frequently Asked Questions - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

NTA 4.4 installation FAQs - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

Platform recommendations for the SQL server are here:

What are the hardware recommendations for the NTA 4.4 SQL Flow Storage database? - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and S…

Orion multi-module system guidelines - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

Both Standard and Enterprise editions are supported with the columnstore technology:

Editions and supported features of SQL Server 2016 | Microsoft Docs

Hope this helps!

jreves​