Change Agent Polling Engine in Bulk Gracefully?

What is the proper way to change the Polling Engine for a bulk amount of nodes without causing the node to go down? I used manage nodes to change the polling engine on 200 nodes, only to figure out after the fact that the node goes into a DOWN status while the agent reinstalls with the new polling engine specified. This triggered a ton of alerts.

How is this properly handled without triggering tons of alerts?

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Accepted answers

marlief22

Hi there,

Un-managing is definitely one way to do this, although you may want to see how the agent is polling (even if it's down) without the alerts triggering.

In this case the "Mute Alerts" is a much better way to achieve this:

That means that you can make all the changes you need, and even if some of the installs fail you can see that, and troubleshoot and know that alerts won't be firing for these devices for the time being.

You can also mute ALL alerts with this very handy, but super hidden button on the Active Alerts page - Good for when you are doing an upgrade of the platform for example and want to bug as few people as possible:

Kind regards,

Marlie Fancourt | SolarWinds Pre-Sales Manager

Prosperon Networks | SolarWinds Partner since 2006

If this helps answer your question please mark my answer as confirmed to help other users, thank you!

All comments

Seashore

I don't think I have done that with agents, only snmp/wmi and that works fine. But can understand the issue here.

Why don't you start by putting them on "mute" and then change polling engine. When ok again you remove the "mute".

LatteLarry

Yeah, we use agent polling and I just found out that one of my polling engines is exceeding the 1000 agent limit. So I went to load balance things and ended up with a lot of pissed off people.

I didn't think about putting them all in maintenance before moving them. I'm not a huge fan of this but I suppose that's the only way. At least the maintenance can be scheduled to end after a period of time. Seems like this process could be improved, like maybe if agent polling fails (during the reinstall) it falls back up to WMI.