Number of Network Elements / Poller

Question

Here's the deal:  We have a large organization and wanted to take advantage of all of the bells and whistles in the NPM 10.1 revision (we also have APM, IPAM, IP SLA, and NCM as modules).

Our server has been running poorly and I was thinking that it may have been related to the number of elements that we are polling.  We are running only a single poller (which is also running everything except for the NCM).  I'm in search of some feedback (both of those from SolarWinds staff and the user community).

Here are OUR specifications:

ItemValueProcessor2x 2.88 GHz Intel Xeon 64RAM8 GBNIC2x GB NIC (Teamed)Network Elements31,107Nodes353Interfaces26,455Volumes4,299

The above is our current configuration, but we are NOT monitoring everything we'd like.  I'd love to hear what everyone's opinion is.  Please post your specs if you can.

One more thing - we are running in two separate data centers and can run virtualization like mad. Let's say that money is no object; how would you design a deployment to follow every server and piece of network gear in the environment? (About 1000 Servers and over 500 Cisco devices plus whatever interfaces and volumes)

bshopp · Answer

I am going to have an SE reach out to you to see if they can assist in guiding you, but in general I would recommend one of two potential paths depending on what makes sense for your organization.

1. If you wish to keep a single main Orion, then you need to add additional pollers to scale out and distribute the load.  We typically recommend approx. 8k elements per poller.

2. You mentioned 2 data centers.  Another path you can take is to put another Orion server in your second data center for local polling and access, add pollers to each sites as required and deploy our Enterprise Operations Console to roll up the two Orion instances into a single dashboard.

kweise · Answer

In general, SolarWinds recommends polling between 8,000 - 10,000 elements per polling engine.  (At least they used to, I haven't looked it up recently.)  With a over 31,000 elements and all the modules, you're going to need more polling engines.

We're polling only 13,500 or so elements and almost 1000 NetFlow interfaces spread over two polling engines and we're at the point of needing a third.

needle · Answer

Excuse the rushed reply, I just lost my first attempt :(

What generation are the Xeon processors in the Orion server?

We went from 2x 3GHz Xeons (about 4+ years old), to 2x 2.33Ghz Xeons E5345 (quad core) and it made a remarkable difference.

SQL runs on a shared SQL server, 2x 6 core AMD Opteron, 48GB RAM, SQL 2005, Windows 2003.

Orion server - 2x 2.33Ghz Xeons, 8 cores total, 8GB RAM, 2x 72GB 15k SAS disks.

Network Elements 1814 
Nodes 280 
Interfaces 872 
Volumes 662 
     
Alerts 32 
Events 59468 
Pollers 2897 
Polling Engines 1 
     
APM monitoring 1140 elements
     
Retain Detail Stats 45 Days 
Retain Hourly Stats 90 Days 
Retain Daily Stats 90 Days 
Retain Events 30 Days

SolarWinds Orion Core 2010.2.0, APM 3.5, NPM 10.1, NTA 3.7, IVIM 1.0.0