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How to - Solarwinds Polling Engine Maintenance mode

Hello all,

I have the need to reboot the Cisco switch that our polling engine and and database server are directly connected to. The switch is getting a new IOS that will also upgrade the microcode so it will take 10 minutes to reboot. What would be the most transparent way to put the Solarwinds server(s) itself in maintenance mode? If i did nothing, what would be the expected results? Would we be flooded with thousands of down alerts followed by thousands of up alerts? We are an ISP and we have hundreds of customer's equipment being monitored and there are almost 500 user accounts per customer. We do not want to send alerts out to all the customers that their equipment is down during the reboot. Also, we use solarwinds data to bill customers based no SLAs and such. We do not want to capture this downtime as all of the customers nodes are down. That would be a huge mess for the billing dept.

Thanks in advance for any expertise shared on this matter.

-Noel

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d09h

Unmanage everything. Do your switch upgrade. When everything is OK with the switch, remanage everything. No polls getting missed, so no alerts to trigger.

nwarnert

Ok, I guess that would work. We have about 15 unmanaged devices out of the 500ish. I guess should make note of them so when I go back to select all to re-manage, uncheck those 15 so they don’t start getting managed again. I was thinking there was something on the server side like stopping the polling service, but this should work.

Hopefully that doesn’t affect any billing items.

Thanks for the reply!

Jan_Pelousek

You can mark your unmanaged devices by Custom property (when assigning that, just group them by status), then unmanage the rest and when remanaging them you can use that custom property for grouping in the Node Management. Complete "Stop polling" is currently not implemented as from the functionality perspective this means almost the same as stopping of the JobEngine* and Collector* services. There's also possible to build the dependencies where that Cisco switch may be parent of your another devices, but in case you don't have them already built, it's kind of heavy for your purpose.

d09h

nwarnert@host.net wrote:
Hopefully that doesn’t affect any billing items.

If we don't see any more posts from you, should we assume it did?

RichardLetts

shutdown the solarwinds server processes during the upgrade.

You'll loose stats collection for that time period but you won't end up with:

a) spurious alerts (very bad)

b) incorrect down-time data for your network

c) quicker than unmanaging and re-managing everything.

nwarnert

The maintenance is tonight and I am still undecided. Richard Letts suggests to shut down the services which was what I was leaning towards before I posted here. I will update with which method I used and after billing dept confirms nothing is screwy looking.

nwarnert

We have 3 physical servers. The polling Engine, Database server and Web server. We should only need to stop the services on the polling engine, correct? You believe this would be a better option than un-managing all?

pratikmehta003

Shutting down the services is a better option...in anycase there is an upgrade activity which means u need not worry about the data collection of that duration.

Once the activity is over, services can be restarted and verify if all working as expected....

RichardLetts

Solarwinds orion has:

Application server / Main poller -- shut the services down here

Additional polling engine -- shut the services down here of you have one

Additional web server -- personally I'd shut these down too if you have one

It makes use of a MS SQLserver -- leave this up.

and, yes it's much quicker than unmanaging nodes. in my environment I keep old nodes in the database for a while because they have the up/downtime associated with them, and I need them for reporting.

Richard