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Over 10,000 network elements - additional polling engine help?

Hi lovely people,

We've reached the 10,000 mark for monitored network elements and I've read that you should start looking at additional polling engines (APE) after 10,000 elements, as you could experience performance issues etc. We have a central deployment which we don't want to stray away from, I just want to add the additional engine for load balancing purposes to prevent it becoming slow etc.

Can someone answer the following questions for me, as our SolarWinds partner confused me completely.

Our set up currently is a main Solarwinds server (NPM, NTA, NCM installed) a secondary server (for the NTA database) and the database server.

Firstly

Will we need an additional server? - (I was told I wouldn't and could install the additional engine on the existing server... which didn't make any sense to me.)

Secondly

Will we need an extra license? if so will it need to match the existing license(s) for our different modules? - (we have NPM, NCM and NTA)

Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks

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Additional Polling Engine

Accepted answers

dgsmith80

Hi Matt,

So let me try and answer your question.

1. You don't NEED a new server, as mentioned you can stack the license to increase the cap, but it sounds more like you want to load balance performance so I would recommend a separate Physical/VM Server.

2. The SolarWinds Additional Polling Engine (APE) is a single license it doesn't come in different sizes, it is a classified as an Additional Polling Engine (Unlimited) because it isn't tied to any of your module limits. Your individual modules (NPM, NCM etc all have separate license tiers). So it has a single SKU and a single price regardless of what modules you possess. There are some small caveats if you have VMAN or SRM as the license cost includes free Pollers for those products but you didn't list those so I won't go into it much.

I'm sorry your support partner didn't give you the clarity you need, but if you want I would be happy to speak with you over the phone and explain it in more detail? I work for an authorised UK Partner. If you would like to do that ping me a private message with your phone number and I will give you a call, or if you would prefer I will ping you mine and you can contact me directly. Hopefully, this message will be sufficient, but the offer is there regardless.

- David Smith

Kenson - SolarWinds Authorized Partner

Training, Licenses & Professional Services

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All comments

james.penter

We have two additional polling engines and use NPM, NCM and SAM. Both of the additional polling engines are on seperate servers. I can't see how you could do it any other way as you select which polling engine to use by server name.

Yes you require an additional polling engine license at an additional cost. I would guess pricing is different for Countries/Markets/Sectors etc so I couldn't speculate on what you would be quoted for price. But for a ballpark figure, one of our additional engines is not too dissimilar in price to the NCM renewal.

orionshark

APE on a new server (Virtual or Physical).

But check the All settings, polling engines page first - if the polling completion value is 100 at all times and the polling rate is not reaching max, then you dont necessarily need a new APE yet.

yaquaholic

1. Yes each Additional Poller Engine (APE) will require a server to be installed upon (ours are all VMs and work fine).

This servers IP will of course need to be added to your ACLs/firewalls to ensure it can correctly poll the environment, with the same rules as your orignal Orion server.

The APE polls the enviroment and then reports this data back to the original Orion server, who then processes it into the DB.

There are cases where people have installed multiple pollers on a single server, but if the size of your polling estate is the problem, I would avoid this.

2. No once you have purchased your APE, as long as you have not used all of your original licesnse (NPM, SAM, NCM, etc) then you will not need to pruchase any more.

So if you're on unlimited licenses, the only limit is the 10,000-12,0000 elements being polled from the poller, adding more APEs allows you to monitor more elements, with the same licenses.

You can now spread the polling load between your original Orion server and the new APE.

You could even shift all of the polling load to the new APE, or leave what you have currently on your original Orion server and just add new things to your APE.

I should also mention that the APEs do not dynamically balance the load of polling, so you wil need to manually tell it which poller will poll which devices.

matt_rees

Thanks for the reply.

So when you say I don't need an additional license... I can basically set up a new VM as the APE and use our existing unlimited license?

Matt

rschroeder

Last year I purchased NAM because I found it would reduce my cost of ownership in licenses and pollers and support, as I moved to polling 100% of all interfaces (60,000+).

NAM was a good fit because it added UDT to my environment, which saves me loads of time. It also is being mined by my CMDB so the Help Desk and other IT staff can predict / know which users and devices will be impacted in case of maintenance or unexpected outage to any switch or router or firewall.

NAM also got me the ability to instantly install up to 20 APE's at no extra charge, and I'm up to seven pollers now. The limitation is 100,000 elements per NPM instance. I hope to be retired before I reach that number of switch ports.

In addition to UDT, NAM came with HA, IPAM, and VNQM (none of which I had), along with NPM, NCM, and NTA (which I had already been using since 2004).

The need for additional servers, whether VM or stand-alone, depends on the resources allocated to the APE and the amount of polling it's doing. For example, in one of my remote regions, the VM environment doesn't have the CPU / PROC speeds or RAM the APE's need. Monitoring the VM hardware hosting the APE guests reveals that adding an APE to that VM Host will only stress it further. I'd already seen it was running at 100% CPU for a while; when I contacted the VM Admins about it, saying I needed another APE as a new Guest on that Host, they built it quickly for me. And then promptly let me know that the Host wasn't able to provide all the resources the various Guests required. They're suggesting I go stand-alone servers for more APE's there, until such time as their team is allocated budget sufficient to the needs of replacing or adding more VM Hosts with more/bigger/faster procs and RAM.

You have some other options to consider, which I don't like:

Pick and choose which elements you monitor. I don't like having unmonitored interfaces; it can result in L1 and L2 errors going unnoticed, and they can cause significant network latency, collisions, retransmits, and user dissatisfaction. But some organizations don't have the budget to monitor all ports, and may choose to have fewer Solarwinds licenses (or smaller ones), and fewer APE's, through only monitoring ports between switches and routers and firewalls, and not monitoring users' access ports. This isn't a great practice from the viewpoint of doing right by the access devices and their customers/users, but it can save you money. In my environment, I'm striving to create and maintain an appropriate Medical Grade Hospital Network for all my sites, and part of that means knowing when there are port-errors on any port.
Monitor less frequently. It'll put less stress on your APE's if you monitor every 180 seconds instead of every 120 seconds. You can stretch that upper limit as far as you dare--only monitor every 600 seconds? Can you tolerate your IT Director and CIO being bombarded by user complaints of outages that haven't been reported to you already by Solarwinds simply because you're not polling nodes for status frequently enough? I can't afford that heat; the scrutiny and "squeaky-wheel-factors" are very high in Emergency Rooms and Operating Rooms. Any of our 17,000 employees will open a Help Desk ticket when things get slow--or when they stop! My Network Team needs to know about those issues, and be working on them, and informing our Help Desk of them--well before users call to report problems.

If receiving sufficient budget for the right amount of APE's and hosts in which to install them is an issue, there are ways to get budget. Even if you've been told "no" previously. Solarwinds has a great video out about it, and I reviewed it and they were kind enough to publish my Guest Blog about it here:

https://thwack.solarwinds.com/community/solarwinds-community/geek-speak/blog/2015/09/08/a-strategem-for-obtaining-fundin…

Read through it, check out the comments--there are great thoughts shared in it, and some of them may get you to the place where you can have the right amount of licenses and tools and APE's for your environment to thrive.

Swift Packets!

Rick Schroeder

matt_rees

Hi thanks for your reply.

So would I still need an extra license if I already have the unlimited license for NPM?

Matt

mesverrum

The thing that you heard about applying more poller licenses to a since server is called a stacked poller. I never set up stacked polling on my primary server because I like have that extra bit of flexibility from the APE being separate, but each server could have up to 4 total polling licenses applied to it to have a polling capacity of ~40,000 elements, assuming you give it enough cpu and memory to process it all. I find it is much preferable in really large environments to stack my APE's versus managing 5-6 APE servers, but there are also some cases where there would be benefits to spreading the APE out, such as if they cover different datacenters or DMZ's then those might be good reasons to run each APE separately.

https://support.solarwinds.com/Success_Center/Orion_Platform/Activate_stackable_poller_licenses

matt_rees

Thanks for your reply, right that explains what I was told.

So If I wasn't going down the stack route and just added an APE as a separate server, do you know if I would need an extra license for it - though we have the unlimited NPM license?

yaquaholic

Nope, with NPM unlimited you can keep on adding APEs, the only restircition is the ~10,000 elements per APE

I have heard of people with 10+ APEs.

matt_rees

That's what I wanted to hear

I'm a little confused as to why I was quoted an entirely new unlimited license for this purpose, which seems to defeat the point of an 'unlimited' license.

yellowtj

We have 128,000+ network elements. It's a global network with hundreds of remote sites. I am running a primary server two additional web servers and 16 pollers. We try to keep our pollers below 10,000 elements. I have a license for each poller. Our NPM, SAM and other licenses are all unlimited so I can't speak for those. I hope this helps.

nglynn

You wouldn't need to add an additional polling engine. You can purchase a stacked polling engine license(s) and add to your existing server assuming your server has plenty of capacity hardware wise. This is a very quick way to bolster your polling capacity with no down time or work really involved.

Boost your server polling capacity with Stackable Poller license

matt_rees

Thanks for the reply yellowtj - so is it a specific APE license you have used for the separate pollers?

matt_rees

Thanks for the reply nglynn - due to server restrictions we will probably have to get a separate server. Thanks for the suggestion though. From what i'm reading (though i'm still none the wiser really) I think I will need to purchase an APE license

dgsmith80

Hi Matt,

So let me try and answer your question.

- David Smith

Kenson - SolarWinds Authorized Partner

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matt_rees

Thankyou for your reply David. That seems to have cleared it up. I know pricing can be account specific but would you know roughly how much an APE license would be?

Thanks for the phone call offer appreciate it. I will defo contact you if I need to discuss.

Matt

prawij

Yes, unfortunately even though you may have paid for a "site license", each polling "engine" is artificially limited to about 12k elements. Once you hit that, even if you have much more hardware resources than actually required, you have to pony up for an additional polling engine (which can either go on a new server or "stack" on top of your existing poller.

dgsmith80

Hi Matt,

SolarWinds list price is £15,205.00 ex VAT (SKU: 1248)

matt_rees

.... thanks David.