Best Practices for deploying SAM and NPM

I am wondering your thoughts on best practices for deploying both the NPM and SAM 5.0 modules. Specifically:

Should they be on the same server? I know it is possible to have them on separate servers, but is there an advantage to one design over the other?
If they are on the same server, should they use the same database instance? Are there any advantages to having them on separate instances?

In our environment, there will be two separate teams - one monitoring NPM and one monitoring SAM. There are roughly 4,000 instances monitored by NPM. We will probably monitor 1-2,000 instances with SAM.

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

John

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FormerMember

I have close to 10,000 elements currently on my polling engine and I would say performance is acceptable. Currently I have my web front end on a different server than the database which is highly recommended. But it also make a difference on what kind of hardware you are using. Physical servers? Virtualized with a SAN backend? I am currently running into storage limitations as the disks on my SAN do not provide enough IOPs for it to perform optimally.

Having two different teams monitor your solution is perfectly fine. You can set up limitations on what they can see within the Orion Web Console.

mrjdubb

The server/servers we are loading Orion on are physical. Our database would be on a SQL 2008 server with a SAN back-end.

Are all of the elements you are polling NPM, or are they split other modules?

FormerMember

We are doing the works. IPAM, NPM, SAM, UDT, etc. All on the same polling engine. What kind of disks do you have in your SAN?

rjnicholson

I like to install my NPM and SAM together and I use 2 polling engines to separate Test/Dev and Production environments, and to keep my polling intervals at a higher frequency. I keep my SQL database on it's own server and connected to my Primary and Secondary Polling engines with a direct connect via cross over cable. I have never had much success using a DB in a SAN or NAS environment due to the read/writes that Orion can produce when it gets up there in elements. We also have NCM, but this sits on its own server and ties to the same SQL DB that NPM and SAM tie to.

Both NPM and SAM write to NetPerfMon, so I don't see any value in having them write to 2 different databases.

mdriskell

One thing no one has mentioned is that by having these all on the same server you gain some functionality. You have all of your nodes in one place no cross referencing two different systems. If management wants a report on what's being monitored you would have to combine data from two different systems.

Any logic you build in can be used by both groups such as custom properties and views. Also what if you had the same node on each? You are then sending double the traffic to it (ICMP,SNMP,WMI)

mrjdubb

Our databases are housed on a SQL 2008 2 node cluster connecting disk to an SVC, then to our SAN, which is made up of 15K rpm drives on both a DS5300 and DS8300. Most of our database storage is on the 5300, I believe. I don't think IOPS will be an issue. We run massive SAP implementations on these systems.

Richard - I like the idea of breaking out the test/dev and production environments with separate polling engines. I assume you use the higher frequency on the production environment?

I appreciate your feedback on this!

mrjdubb

You make some excellent points. I think I'm making an assumption that the NPM is monitoring switches, routers, firewalls, and that our SAM will be monitoring mostly our Windows and VM infrastructure. Do you find overlap when monitoring with both SAM and NPM?

mdriskell

The interesting thing I have found is every so often you need a SAM monitor for a router/switch/firewall type device. Just last week for example I wrote a SAM monitor to check our NTP server which is our core router. If I was in the split model like you mentioned I would be monitoring the router in NPM and the router in SAM.

I have never ran SAM standalone so I am honestly not 100% certain it can do everything NPM does like look at VMware or UCS chassis.

FormerMember

I like to think of it as NPM will monitor everything it can via SNMP which in your case includes your windows machines to get some basic information like Disk volume size, response time, cpu, memory, etc. SAM will go deeper into your windows machines via SNMP or preferably WMI as it will poll more information. This will allow you to monitor features and roles within your windows environments like DFS, Remote Desktop services, etc.

rjnicholson

You can see some overlap depending on which templates you assign to Servers you are monitoring with NPM. But in general NPM is a good hardware/health monitor and SAM can dip into the OS and Apps on the server.

I tend to only see overlap on Perl scripts for Linux. I tend not to trust Net-SNMP on Linux.. Not only that Linux guys like to see Run-Queue and other CPU stats that SNMP just doesn't poll. Same goes for memory and swap useage. SNMP just plain lacks, so I run Memory and CPU scripts on these boxes to get more granular, so there is some statistic overlap, but it doesn't throw anyone off or change the value of the data being provided.

You will find that using SolarWinds to monitor your environment in "Layers" can be very beneficial. I use this approach to get deeper on systems that are more critical with SAM, and only use NPM when the system isn't as critical (for Poller resources sake), but SNMP Metrics are still very useful and can still provide useful baseline metrics.