Tweaks and special setup for NPM/APM installs.

Question

I noticed there seems to be a lot of little tweaks and permission's on the Solarwinds server relating to IIS and COM+. Does anyone have a document of everything that needs to be configured for an optimal environment? I know support has sent me numerous items and tidbits to make sure are setup and looking in the forums people have other settings that have "helped" their setups.

Maybe we can start a thread of posting these tweaks to this topic as general best practice suggestions? Ideas?

aLTeReGo · Answer

It would be nice to know all of these things up front.

Having installed NPM probably 200 times now, I can probably say with absolute certainty that if you required NTFS permission changes to make the product run properly, then your NTFS permissions are not the default NTFS permissions that come with Windows.

Now it would be nice if Solarwinds documented exactly what permissions they needed to exactly which files/folders, but honestly I'm not aware of any company that publishes such a document for any product. When/if I get into trouble with my hardened windows servers, I just whip out my trusty FileMon utility and start looking for the permissions errors.

I really am sorry that you're having difficulty with your NPM install, but when in doubt, try and reproduce the problem on a standard installation of Windows first to eliminate the possibility of issues with any modifications/customizations that were made to your windows install.

DirtySouth · Answer

I'd like to know as well. So far my initial NPM install has not gone well. I talked to Support who had me change some rights on a few folders. It would be nice to know all of these things up front.

viol8tor · Answer

I second that motion, there should be a thread for best practices / optimizations based on usage scenarios.

IIS - 
For my two cents, I usually like to assign a dedicated application pool for each website I host on my web servers.
 - The application pools, by default, are set to purge the worker process every 29 hours.  This can be rather inconvenient if it occurs during working hours.
 - DO NOT ASSIGN more than 1 worker process in the application pool for the NPM website. This tends to wreak havoc on APM web displays.