Can I promote an additional poller to be the primary?

Question

I'd like to shutdown polling on my main Orion sever and make it strictly and app server. Can I promote an existing additional polling engine to be the primary?

silverbacksays · Answer

Ah, in that case, the simplest thing to do is to move all nodes from the Primary to the APE. You can do this via Manage Nodes or Manage Elements. I will explain the process of doing this via Manage Nodes, as that is the default view people use.

Before I do this, however, please make sure that your APE can reach all your nodes for the polling methods you use. For example, ensure that SNMP (TCP port 161) is open from the APE you want to use and those nodes polled via SNMP.

If you do not do this check, you may find you have nodes showing stale data, or worse, showing as down if the APE cannot reach them by ICMP (or the relevant agent port/SNMP, if you have chosen these methods to calculate node availability and uptime)

Also, you need to pay attention to the polling limits of a single polling engine. View this page and the short video linked on it for details:

documentation.solarwinds.com/.../orion_platform_scalability_engine_guidelines.htm

If you have too many nodes or elements than a single polling engine can handle, moving everything over to your APE will lead to reduced polling intervals at best, or missed polls at worse!.

With that out of the way, here's how you move all your nodes to your APE via 'MANAGE NODES':

Via Manage Nodes, on the left-hand column sort by POLLING ENGINE and click on the name of your PRIMARY server.

Check the box to the left of the 'Name' column, and if you have more nodes managed by it than the current page size, click on 'Select all Nodes'.

With all the nodes managed by your PRIMARY server now selected, click on the 'MORE ACTIONS' drop-down at the top of the table, and select 'CHANGE POLLING ENGINE'.

You will be presented witha pop-up box which shows your PRIMARY server, and all APEs you have installed. Select the relevant APE, and then click the 'CHANGE POLLING ENGINE' button.

This will reduce the impact of polling on the PRIMARY server, but you still need to retain it as it is the manager for all alerts etc.

bobmarley · Answer

Why don't you simply remove the nodes from your main poller and assign them to other polling engines? In your Manage Nodes screen under More Actions the action Change Polling Engine is available. Simply select the nodes and move them to another engine. We don't leave any of our nodes long term on our primary polling engine, we move them to the additional pollers. This takes some of the processing off of the main poller as well as providing a 'parking lot' for us so when a new node is added by 'in the field' users or during a discovery it lands on the main poller first. Then we verify it was added correctly, before moving the node to another poller.

If you want a new primary polling engine just stage up a new server, run the installer, and connect to the database. It is a simple process.

peter.lewis_NetWolves · Answer

I want to reduce the resource usage on our core server by eliminating polling from the server.