Element Load Balancing

Like many SolarWinds customers we have a large environment with over 10,000 nodes. Its constantly changing and routinely needs elements/nodes reallocated to the polling engine with the least load. My question is... Can someone help me, or point me into the correct direction to develop a report that querys all nodes providing the number of polled IP's, interfaces, volumes, and SAM components ?

If it makes it easier, I would be fine with leaving the SAM part out, for the most part im concerned with elements (NPM)

Thanks community!!

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Accepted answers

mrxinu

Hey there, give this a try. You can also drop this into the web-report writer as a SWQL report:

SELECT    n.Engine.ServerName AS PollerName    ,n.Caption    ,ISNULL(i.Qty, 0) AS InterfaceCount    ,ISNULL(v.Qty, 0) AS VolumeCount    ,ISNULL(i.Qty, 0)+ISNULL(v.Qty, 0)+1 AS TotalElementsFROM Orion.Nodes nLEFT JOIN(    SELECT NodeID, COUNT(1) AS Qty FROM Orion.NPM.Interfaces GROUP BY NodeID) i ON n.NodeID = i.NodeIDLEFT JOIN(    SELECT NodeID, COUNT(1) AS Qty FROM Orion.Volumes GROUP BY NodeID) v ON n.NodeID = v.NodeIDORDER BY PollerName, TotalElements DESC

All comments

mrxinu

Hey there, give this a try. You can also drop this into the web-report writer as a SWQL report:

SELECT    n.Engine.ServerName AS PollerName    ,n.Caption    ,ISNULL(i.Qty, 0) AS InterfaceCount    ,ISNULL(v.Qty, 0) AS VolumeCount    ,ISNULL(i.Qty, 0)+ISNULL(v.Qty, 0)+1 AS TotalElementsFROM Orion.Nodes nLEFT JOIN(    SELECT NodeID, COUNT(1) AS Qty FROM Orion.NPM.Interfaces GROUP BY NodeID) i ON n.NodeID = i.NodeIDLEFT JOIN(    SELECT NodeID, COUNT(1) AS Qty FROM Orion.Volumes GROUP BY NodeID) v ON n.NodeID = v.NodeIDORDER BY PollerName, TotalElements DESC

patriot

Nice report Steven and great timing as I was thinking about how to construct the same report. Is there a way to add the ability to show a total element count for each polling engine into this same query?

mrxinu

You're too kind! Sure, but it would be repeated on every line. If that works for you - here you go.

SELECT    n.Engine.ServerName AS PollerName    ,n.Caption    ,ISNULL(i.Qty, 0) AS InterfaceCount    ,ISNULL(v.Qty, 0) AS VolumeCount    ,ISNULL(i.Qty, 0)+ISNULL(v.Qty, 0)+1 AS TotalElements    ,n.Engine.Elements AS TotalPollerElementsFROM Orion.Nodes nLEFT JOIN(    SELECT NodeID, COUNT(1) AS Qty FROM Orion.NPM.Interfaces GROUP BY NodeID) i ON n.NodeID = i.NodeIDLEFT JOIN(    SELECT NodeID, COUNT(1) AS Qty FROM Orion.Volumes GROUP BY NodeID) v ON n.NodeID = v.NodeIDORDER BY PollerName, TotalElements DESC

nick_scott

Thanks Steve! Will be taking a look at this shortly!

nick_scott

Steve, do you find it easier to write query's in SWQL vs SQL ?

nick_scott

You nailed it Steve, I can add a few custom properties such as environment (filter on Dev/Test) and remove the nonsense from my DB. There is no reason I should be monitoring 100+ interfaces on a dev box!! Steve, thank you so much!!!

wluther

mrxinu It would be great if SolarWinds would just assign some sort of weighted value to each node, and made that value accessible to us, so we could see a real time cost of service per node value. It would make moving nodes around much easier.

mrxinu

Agreed. I smell a feature request.

wluther

You make it, and I'll vote it up?

cahunt

I have a report that show Job Weight for each Orion Server and the Weight Scale Metric for each Application Component. Element counts are also included.

Though it would be great to see this natively.

Orion+Application+and+Polling+Server+Load+Details.xml

sheepy28

thanks for this, had a similar issue

RichardLetts

At the risk of pointing out that the numbers of elements are not linearly correlated correlated with the Polling rate.

Consider four of our polling engines below (All four servers are identical, aside from the nodes being polled.)

The two pollers running at 50% or less have more than 10,000 elements on them

	P1	P3	P5	P7
ELEMENTS	8805	9779	12546	10371
POLLING RATE	77%	87%	50%	45%
HARDWARE HEALTH POLLING RATE	41%	48%	7%	25%
ROUTING POLLING RATE	1%	0%	0%	0%
UNDP POLLING RATE	0%	1%	0%	0%
WIRELESS POLLING RATE	0%	13%	16%	1%
INTERFACE ELEMENTS	7119	7523	11832	8298
NETWORK NODE ELEMENTS	1645	2253	704	2063
NUMBER OF HW HEALTH MONITORS	1248	1467	495	1550
NUMBER OF HW HEALTH SENSORS	11013	10696	3986	13916
POLLING COMPLETION	99.99	100	99.99	99.99
TOTAL JOB WEIGHT	3394	4288	3986	4177
VOLUME ELEMENTS	41	3	10	10

This suggests that additional polling load has a disproportionate cost.

note: P7 has more of everything than P1 (other than volume elements and routing polling, and they are not /that/ different ), yet has a considerably lower polling rate (difference = 32%)

wluther

RichardLetts I think the magic is in having the weight/score of each node visibly attached as a metric for that node, however it is SolarWinds wants to do that, so we can query that score, and balance the pollers better.

Like you said, you have 4 identical polling servers, yet two of them have thousands more elements, while they are only being 50% utilized, in comparison. A node's weight should stay the same across all pollers, with only the polling rate percentage varying, correct?

Are you saying the weight of each node would differ, based on which polling engine it was placed on? Or, are you saying that the weight of each node would be a set number (based on polling frequency, interfaces, vols, apps, etc.), with the weight remaining the same across any polling server, with only each server's polling rate percentage changing?

If a node has a total polling weight of 100 (as an arbitrary example, calculated by polling frequency, interfaces, vols, apps, etc.), are you saying the weight for that node would be 100 on P1, but 150 on P2, or 90 on P3, etc.? Or are you saying the weight of the node would be calculated as 100, regardless of which polling engine it was placed on, only producing a varied polling rate percentage per polling server? (Maybe 100 = .3% on P1, but 100 = 1.2% on P5, or 100 = .91% on P7)

How are you managing your pollers/devices polled? (Other than repetition and experience) Do you manually balance your pollers, and then apply custom properties to the nodes on each poller to manage them? I am always looking for better ways to manage mine, as I'm sure we all are, but it looks like you are running with at least 2x more than me.

Thank you,

-Will

douglasmauro

Did you get your table via report or have to create by hand? If report, care to share? TIA.

RichardLetts

It is at this point, some months later that I post a Mea Culpa -- I know why the polling load on two of the servers is only half of what it should be and after correcting the issue I'm seeing polling loaded broadly in line with the number of elements on them.

[I had effectively stacked licences on two of the servers because of an interaction with FoE, licensing services, NCM, and specially generated license keys]