Help answer our great SAM Agent debate

bourlis

We have a SAM Agent debate and we're about to install a lab to answer the debate I wanted to post this question on Thwack to get the expert advice.

     Here's the debate:

      How do agents report back to the polling engines, via polling engine DNS names or via polling engine IP address?

SAM Agent Settings:

     Allow automatic agent registration - enabled

     Automatically create node - enabled

     Allow automatic agent updates - disabled

     How long should newly registered agents be displayed as new -  24 hrs

     Communication mode - Agent Initiated (Recommended)

    

Scenario:

We have a PCI-CDE environment that has firewall rules that don't allow inbound communication from the Solarwinds. Only outbound communication is allowed, and only one Polling Engine.  This Polling Engine is designated as our PCI-CDE Polling Engine and agents are installed locally on the server by the server admins. PCI-CDE nodes cannot be moved to another Polling Engine.

We need to retire that existing PCI-CDE Polling Engine and replace it with a new one.  The new server will have a the same IP address, but a new system name.  The deal is we know and acknowledge a monitoring outage for the PCI-CDE environment.  We want to mitigate the outage time window as much as possible, ease our workload and ensure all nodes are still being monitored in the end.

If the agents talk to the polling engines via IP address then we'll leave the agent settings as is, decommission the old sever and commission the new server with the same IP and in theory the agents will "perceptively" restore communication to the polling engine and won't care that it's a new server with a new system name.

Alternatively, if the agents care about the polling engine host name that we have to commission the new server with the old servers name and re-name it at a later point in time, which means extra steps.

So..... if anyone knows the answer it would help settle the debate and prevent diverted time in a lab installing a test environment.

dfairles

The scaleability engine information is stored in the database.  You can just change the name of the poller or your nodes will be orphaned.  Doesn't matter if it is an agent for not.

You will need to migrate your nodes to another poller, deactivate the license on the old poller, and remove it from your Solarwinds system.  It won't let you do that until all your nodes are migrated from that poller..  You will then need to spin up a new poller, license it and then migrate your nodes back.  Or you can use the same system name when you build the new poller.  I have wiped out pollers and rebuilt the OS using the same names and IP's and this works after you run the config wizard.

Query your engines table and you see what I mean.  Also look at your SolarWinds.Agent.Service.exe.cfg file in C:\Program Files (x86)\SolarWinds\Agent

It may be possible to modify your engines table, but all you agent config files will be wrong.  You really need to use the same system name if you cannot migrate your nodes.