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Dependency checking

Hi all,

I understand that Orion checks for the status of the parent when a child entity goes down. What I don't know is how it checks. Does it look at the status in the database or does it ping the parent to see if it is up?

Thanks!

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All comments

adatole

While this may have changed slightly in recent versions, what I understood it to do was:

Child node went down
SolarWinds notes that it is the child of *something* and injects a delay of 1.5 polling cycles before doing anything
after the delay, SolarWinds checks the child node's current state in the database (up/down/etc), and checks the parent node status in the database (up/down/etc)
SolarWinds then updates the child node's status (down/unreachable)

What SolarWinds does NOT do is initiate an additional poll to check the parent at the time the child node is seen to be down.

Again, my information on this may be out of date. I would love anyone's comments to the contrary.

mcbridea

Checking the DB to determine if a parent is down seems like a bad solution. If this is the case I would expect the "supperession" functon to work randomly.

Bronx

Up/Down status is reported via ICMP (ping). If it gets marked as down, then it will be listed in the database as Down in the Nodes Table.

mcbridea

Yes, ICMP status is marked in the database. My quesstion is that then a child entity is down does Orion ping the parent for status or look at the last status record in the database. These are two different things.

adatole

Andy: I know exactly what you are saying and it was my criticism as well - a "better" (ie: more accurate) method would be to say "oh, serverA is down? Let me ping it's parent right now. Nope, it's down too. OK. Mark ServerA as "unreachable". Now, let's go see about ServerA's parent's parent...."

However, SW took another tack which was to insert an extra polling cycle delay (ie: 2 more minutes). That gives the regular polling cycle time to evaluate the parent node and get it's status before tagging the status of the child.

I have to consistently remind my colleagues (the network and server teams) that SolarWinds is not SmokePing. That said, it's upstream analysis is not as robust as I would like it.

Once again - my information is about 18 months old. SW could have changed the process since then. I'm hoping someone "official" will comment.

mcbridea

That makes sense. Not that I like it a bunch.

rharland2012

I know this is an old thread, but is this still the mechanism for dependency checking?

Thanks for any info.