Exceeding Element Count

AlejandroSobral

Hello everyone,

I'm analyzing an exceeding monitoring limits case. I have two Orion instances, one for monitoring Network and the other for Apps mainly. Let's call it "Net" and "App". The first consist of just one Main Poller, and the other is made of a Main Poller and three APEs.

Both instances are overloaded in terms of elements or monitors that they should poll. In fact, either Net or App are raising "Element count" warning. Net is monitoring 12940 (Over 10k) elements with its Main Poller and App is monitoring more than 30000 monitors per Additional Poller and over 17000 in the Main Poller, (Over the 12K limit again).

However, checking the "SAM Application Polling Rate" and the "Polling Rate" (at Settings->Details->Polling Engines) I have found that neither Net or App rates are reaching 100% or even being near of it. Actually, none of them is over 50%.

There is any explanation for this? I mean, Orion is firing warning about it, but the highest Rate is at 50%. How could this be possible?

Thanks in advance.

Ale.

christopher.t.jones123

@AlejandroSobral, the advertised limits are for what SolarWinds defines as default polling intervals or what they ship with out-of-the-box. When you have disparities such as this it's likely that the polling intervals have been increased (increasing the time between polls and reducing the total number of polls). Increasing polling intervals can effectively increase any polling engine's capacity beyond what is advertised, the downfall would be that there is a much larger window where a substandard can exist on an element and not be found. 

What is probably occurring from a health page and warning perspective is that SolarWinds is looking for a static number of elements and warning you based on it, however, it is not taking into account any modified polling intervals. The polling rate value is probably the one you'll want to base capacity on because that is a dynamic value taking into account polling intervals and should be a more accurate reflection of your polling engine's capacity.

This article might be able to shed a little more light