poller licensing

Hi All, first time Thwack post, please be kind.
I think I heard some bad info given at my first 'SWUG' meet up this year from a guest speaker about Pollers and I gave that to my managers. In summary:

Pollers are free, so spin up what you need.
Use temporary pollers to test in your environment first so you don't break production (live).
Spread your 'entities' across multiple pollers so if one fails, you don't lose your ability to monitor across all your networking/server devices.
Move as many network/server devices off the 'default' poller to another poller as performance is badly impacted on your default device and you will see significant improvements.

Here's what we encountered:
We were out of license compliance because we had set up to many pollers.
Moving devices off the 'default' poller did not improve performance, but broke our ability to get logs and monitor network devices on the secondary poller (unlicensed). (SQL DB is not local)
We now paid for multiple pollers that are listed to support ~13k entities each, when we have <200 entities on some and paid a license for.

I am very disheartened at this and the cost of this poller snafu is in the thousands.
I left SWUG feeling empowered and now fear a licensing retribution is coming.

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ChrystalT

Hi, I'm sorry for the confusion that you've experienced. Based on your commentary here, it looks like you're referring to additional polling engines (this is important context as there are other aspects of the products referred to as "pollers.")

For clarification, I believe the guest speaker was referring to the additional polling engine licenses included with a SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted Enterprise license. If you have modular licensing, additional polling engine licenses are a separate cost as you've found. More information on the licensing can be found here.

I hope this clarification helps, and please let me know if we there's anything else we can do to help.