Which "Components" number is correct?

I know that the limit for SAM components for a single polling engines is 10,000, but which number for SAM components is the one to keep an eye on?

You can see a total number on the License Details page.

There is another much larger number listed for each polling engine on the "Total Elements per poller" page that is a link at the bottom of the Database Details page. Which number is the one that indicates the true load on my polling engines.

In my case, I have 5 total polling engines. The total number of components listed on the License Details page is 12592 (which is distributed across the four APEs). The "Total elements per poller" page says that I have 9773, 7926, 10415, and 9888 components on the four APEs!! That's a total of 38002 components!! What gives? What is the difference between the two numbers for components?

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steffen.gutzeit

Hello.

Are you using more than just the SAM module? An element is either a device (node), interface or volume.

When you say you have 5 Scalability Engines and 12k components then you are pretty safe as each single Scalability Engine (aka APE) supports 10k components on the standard polling rate.

Best regards,

Steffen

patriot

I have eight Orion modules installed, but I am not talking about Elements. I specifically mentioned the different values for "Components" that I see in the locations mentioned. Thanks.

jrouviere

I've asked this question to Support previously and they've told me that "Total Elements per poller" is the definitive measure for scaling.

What you might be seeing is a difference between Licensed Components and Actual Components (my terms). For example, when using AppInsight templates you may be "charged" 50 components worth of Licensing, so 50 Licensed Components, but in reality it's doing 200 Components worth of work, so your Actual Components is 200.

I have a similar phenomenon in our environment, though I've minimized the use of the AppInsight templates, I have ~12,600 Licensed Components and about ~15,000 Actual Components. The latter is important for scaling load as in your case, the former is important for scaling cost.

patriot

Thanks for the reply. So, that leads to more questions....

Are you saying that If I apply Appinsight for SQL to four servers, that I will have used 200 "licensed" components? If so, how many "total" components? This just does not make sense.

Also, if the "total" components value is the number that should be applied against the recommendation of 10,000 components per polling server in the SAM specifications, then how is a user supposed to realistically plan an Orion deployment when that number cannot be predicted until AFTER applications have been deployed? Do you see what I am asking?

jrouviere

It's a classic scaling question, you can always estimate, but you're not likely going to know every nuance until the solution is deployed.

Let me try another example.

You have four domain controllers, you apply the AppInsight for Active Directory template to each of them (I don't know the actual numbers, so continuing with my previous example). So you have licensed 200 components, but the actual load on the APE according to the count is 800 components. Make sense? Since each template is 50 licenses, but the actual component count is 200, you pay for 200 (50 x4) licensed components, but the server load should be treated as 800 (200 x4).

Depending on what you're trying to scale, the good news here is that if you have consistencies in your deployments then it's pretty easy to estimate. If you set up one of your domain controllers, or SQL servers in your case with the monitoring and find out that you're using 59 components (AppInsight plus one or two others maybe) and 216 actual components, you just multiply the number for your nodes. Usually best to start small and scale up.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I don't see a lot of customers who just buy all in on Orion immediately and plan to monitor 300+ servers, 50 AppInsight templates, and then 500+ other/custom application templates. So scaling to 100k components happens over time or with other experience (but that's my experience, it's an anecdote, not data). Further, only the AppInsight templates really behave this way. I don't recall entirely the reason, but it's presented as a "discount" to the in depth monitoring. They are quite resource intensive (as a result of the higher component counts), but can be cheaper than doing it yourself.

Lastly, if you're having trouble with the estimations reach out to your sales contact. They have almost certainly fielded a similar question and if not, have resources (Sales Engineers) who almost certainly have and can help you find the right size as well.

mesverrum

You have nailed the struggle. There is not really an accurate way to predict how many components an app insight template will create. You can ball park, for example I think each table in a SQL instance is about 30 components, on top of the global components for the whole server. So a db with 40 databases on it might actually end up with over 1,000 components on it for just that one template.

What we usually do is just apply loose averages and hope for the best. That leads into why solarwinds has moved sam away from component count based licenses + ape to the node based licenses where you pay per server and can stand up however many APE's you want as your needs unfold.

serena

patriot wrote:
I know that the limit for SAM components for a single polling engines is 10,000, but which number for SAM components is the one to keep an eye on?
You can see a total number on the License Details page.
There is another much larger number listed for each polling engine on the "Total Elements per poller" page that is a link at the bottom of the Database Details page. Which number is the one that indicates the true load on my polling engines.
In my case, I have 5 total polling engines. The total number of components listed on the License Details page is 12592 (which is distributed across the four APEs). The "Total elements per poller" page says that I have 9773, 7926, 10415, and 9888 components on the four APEs!! That's a total of 38002 components!! What gives? What is the difference between the two numbers for components?

/Orion/Admin/Details/DatabaseDetails.aspx

TerryHarding

Hi Serena,

So, if the Component Count under Database Details, Total Element Count is 13,000 plus, would you say that an Additional Polling Engine is required to carry the load even though the Polling Engines Details page shows the SAM polling percentage to be 8% of its maximum rate?

Regards,

Terry

patriot

Exactly the question I need answered TerryHarding. Thank you. In a nutshell, one gets mixed signals from SAM about what the true load is on the server and therefore, when and how many APEs are needed.