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Newbie Questions

Hi,

Im kinda familiarizing myself with how the solarwind behave or process.I highly appreciate any reply to any of my questions below.....

1. What is the use of poller engine/server?

2. Let say for example I have 3 poller engine A, B , C ..... poller A got 3998 elements, Poller B got 2000, and poller C got nothing. These 3 pollers are connected to 1 SQL server.......what questions are....

a. What happen to the elements if Poller A somehow stopped or the server itself stop responding?

b. Is elements in poller A can also be found in Poller B or vice versa?

3. How I can check redundancy of elements among the servers?

4. What is the threshold time of an element in SQL server?

Please help me understand more about the poller engines, how it setup and why it is setup like that.....

I'm searching complete video tutorials of the product but I can only see the basics here in the website....

Thank you in advance for replying....

Neil

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Accepted answers

Yann

The Statistics and Settings are stored in the database. If your database is stored remotely and has enough disk space you should be good. Orion and its modules should not fill in the disk as the services are configured to keep the log files under 5 or 10 MB.

Otherwise it is more a Windows question you are raising...If the RAM is full will Windows be able to write in the paging file etc.

All comments

Yann

Hi,

1- A poller engine or polling engine increases the number of network elements your installation can handle. A single server can in theory handle up to 8000 network elements. When you reach a certain limit but needs to increase the number of network elements monitored you hire a new polling engine in your server's farm.

a- They are no more polled till the server starts back.

b- No. A Node belong to an engine in the database. You can however move easily Nodes among your Polling Engines with the Monitor Polling Engines utility to balance the servers. If you need to ensure your nodes will keep being monitored in the event of a Polling Engine failure, you might want to add a hotstandby engine to your architecture. A such server takes over the role of a failing Polling Engine.

3- Using Database Manager should make easily that task by running some SQL Queries. I would not advise you to add a node on two different polling engine as the node will be polled twice in parallel. It is more advisable to look at the hot-standy engine to ensure the redundancy. Let me know if you need some sql queries to detect duplicate nodes in the database.

4- Do you mean the Polling Interval, Alerts' Thresholds or anything else? not sure what you are asking there.

You should read the "How Orion Network Performance Monitor Works" paragraph in the chapter 1 of the Admin guide. There is a nice diagram about the architecture and the components (page 23).

http://www.solarwinds.com/support/Orion/docs/OrionAdministratorGuide.pdf

Let me know if you need more details somewhere.

Regards,

Yann

neilmborilla

Follow up questions

1. How this hotstandby engine takes over since the primary polling engine is down? Does the elements on that polling engine is gone too?

2. What is the role of SQL server since polling engine is already there?

3. How can i delete duplicated elements or nodes and retain only 1?

4. When upgrading or setting up Service Packs....Do I need to install it also to other polling engines? or just in the primary polling engine will do? what happen if I only apply the SP to the primary and disregard the other servers/polling engine?

Sorry for asking too much but I really need to know the architecture.

Yann

b-1: The Hot-Standby regularly checks the KeepAlive entry in the Engines table for each poller and take over the role if the field has not been updated for a while. Needless to say that you need to synchronize the datetime on all your servers. When the Hot-Standby takes over the role of a polling engine, it acts like the down server and this is transparent from the database side, which means the structure of the Engines-Network Elements mapping in the database remain the same.

b-2: the SQL Server is there as a back-end to store all the settings, statistics. It is far more reliable than using e.g. text files. why a centralized database? Because mutliple modules that may be located on different servers need access to the stored information (WebConsole, ReportWriter, Polling Engine, Trap Service, etc.)

b-3: Have a look there:

b-4: You need to upgrade all the Polling Engine to the same version/ServicePack before to restart the services or you might have some problems with e.g. the consistency of your database.

Thanks,

Yann

neilmborilla

Thanks for all the inputs sir and also thanks for the patience.

What happen if I use the option of balance polling engine in Monitor Polling Engine? What are the pro's and con's ?