Second Polling Engine and a Fallback

Question

Just curious what expected behavior is with a second polling engine.  I have about half of our nodes being monitored by our second polling engine.  I've noticed that when I drop my secondary polling engine (either shut down services or kill the server) my nodes on that server don't report down.  Will the primary SW instance pick up polling for those devices?  Or, did I just not wait long enough to see those nodes "break"?

m_roberts · Answer

What you want to do is create/enable the default Orion Polling Engine down alert, so that you can be alerted to the fact that this APE has gone offline and is no longer polling the devices assigned to it.

Orion should not put those devices in a down state, as that is not the condition that exists, as if it did receivers of the alerts will begin working the alerts on the basis that the devices are down, when they are not (in all likelihood)

d09h · Answer

http://www.solarwinds.com/documentation/en/flarehelp/orionplatform/content/core-how-orion-works-sw1625.htm

relevant part:

The polling engine requests real-time statistics (through the selected polling method, such as SNMP or WMI) from monitored devices in your environment.

Polled data is further processed and stored in the SolarWinds Orion database.  (In the scenario you described, poller can't/ won't populate database.)

How Orion Platform products work

Orion Platform products monitor the health and performance of your network through ICMP, SNMP, WMI, API, and Syslog communication and data collection.

A simple centralized Orion Platform deployment includes at least two servers:

* Primary server where you install your Orion Platform products. The primary server includes the Main Polling Engine and the Orion Web Console.
* A separate server to install the SolarWinds Orion database.

The polling engine requests real-time statistics (through the selected polling method, such as SNMP or WMI) from monitored devices in your environment.

Polled data is further processed and stored in the SolarWinds Orion database.

Data is requested from the database and displayed in Orion Web Console.

See Orion Scalability Engine guidelines for information about scaling you Orion Platform product.

cha-chang_ · Answer

Just to add to d09h's response.  What you are seeing is expected.  Nodes report to the poller you assign it and do not auto-magically find another poller.