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Beginner Question: DPA Physical Location Limitations?

We are looking at deploying DPA globally, and we initially thought of standing up three rather beefy Servers, one in North America, one in Europe, and one in Asia, with the intent that each one has about 10-15 critical DBs monitored within their own region. Congruently, we have 3 primary pollers, one in each region, that we would be tying the DPA instances into. We have Two Ideas on how to accomplish that;

1 - Our original Idea was to have One DPA in each region, Polling the DBs at different sites withing there region.

(Example: DPA located in New York, Polling DBs in Colorado, Phoenix, and Seattle)

2 - A Team has been adamant that we would need a DPA Instance built at each site, all feeding into their regional "Central" DPA, and then tie in the Central DPA to Orion.

Standing up another ~40 servers just for DPA would create a lot of care and feeding for or relatively small Monitoring team, However we are now concerned that going with Idea 1 will cause performance issues that would offset any good DPA is doing.

Is it recommended to have a DPA server located at each site you are monitoring?

I'd welcome anyone experience with this.

Thanks in Advance!

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Accepted answers

mandevil

Let me kick off the replies with a few thoughts:

We recommend getting DPA as close to the databases being monitoring as possible (and by close, I mean with least network latency possible)
We will be sending bursts of data across the network (primarily during our stats poll which occurs every 10 minutes) - so depending on bandwidth, I have seen this fail due to timeouts)
There are no licensing concerns with implementing as many DPA installations as you like (or are willing to administer)

Having said that, my personal recommendation would be to stand up your DPA instance in NY, poll your distributed sites. Let it do collections for a few days. Take a look at your logs - look for:

Any polling errors due to timeouts in idc.log
contime.csv check on quickpoll activity and statspoll activity to make sure they are succeeding 600/600 and 1/600 respectively (that's 600 successful polls in 600 seconds and 1 successful poll in 600 seconds)
Review network traffic patterns with your network admins to make sure it's not causing issues elsewhere.

If collections are failing, then consider breaking it apart into a DPA install local to each site. If it all looks good, well, you should be good.

I'm keeping it very general here as every environment is different, but these are the steps I'd likely take if tasked with standing up monitoring for a new geographically distributed environment. It will make integration to Orion a lot simpler also.

All comments

mandevil

Let me kick off the replies with a few thoughts:

We recommend getting DPA as close to the databases being monitoring as possible (and by close, I mean with least network latency possible)
We will be sending bursts of data across the network (primarily during our stats poll which occurs every 10 minutes) - so depending on bandwidth, I have seen this fail due to timeouts)
There are no licensing concerns with implementing as many DPA installations as you like (or are willing to administer)

Having said that, my personal recommendation would be to stand up your DPA instance in NY, poll your distributed sites. Let it do collections for a few days. Take a look at your logs - look for:

Any polling errors due to timeouts in idc.log
contime.csv check on quickpoll activity and statspoll activity to make sure they are succeeding 600/600 and 1/600 respectively (that's 600 successful polls in 600 seconds and 1 successful poll in 600 seconds)
Review network traffic patterns with your network admins to make sure it's not causing issues elsewhere.

If collections are failing, then consider breaking it apart into a DPA install local to each site. If it all looks good, well, you should be good.

bmrad

One additional clarification: For the Orion integration, each DPA server must be added Orion, it does not operate via DPA Central.

rfackrell

Awesome. Thank you both for replying mandevil and bmrad.

I was able to take this suggestion to our team and begin a great conversation around it.

Just in case it'll help anyone else out,

We are leaning towards doing as suggested and standing up the individual regional DPAs and expanding them if needed.

Again, Thanks for your help!

bmrad

Glad to help, and don't hesitate to ask more questions. Let us know how it turns out too.