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Considerations For Building Highly Available SolarWinds Monitoring And Alerting Solution

AlexSoul over 10 years ago

Hi All SW Gurus,

I would appreciate if you can help us all to gather as much info as possible in this threat on various recommendations with regards to building highly available monitoring solution for the IT systems. For example some questions I am trying to answer:

* Can I have more than 1 app server to keep them in different physical sites? Does active-passive, active-active or similar architecture supported? Do I need extra license for it?

* When would I consider polling engines? How can they increase availability?

* How to approach IT systems monitoring taking into account that SolarWinds solution itself is part of IT Infrastructure. What if entire infrastructure is down at my main site? How do I still ensure I get decent monitoring in place to help me troubleshoot issues?

* etc...

It would be really interesting to learn how other THWACK members approach the challenge of keeping monitoring solution highly available so that it always stays on top of every failure and problem within IT environment

Thank You,

Alex

Top Replies

0 markcallaghan over 10 years ago

Hi Alex,
I've deployed our NPM with platform resilience in mind. My application server sits on a VMWare cluster that spans two data centers as does my SQL database. Unfortunately I've not come up with a way to effectively have HA from an application perspective yet. I have deployed a remote polling agent in our other European data centers that do the polling of remote nodes and report their information back to the core node.
When your doing your planning you need to bear in in mind that there is a hard limit of 10,000 nodes per NPM server that can be monitored. That can be increased by deploying more polling agents. And there aren't any limits (that I know of) around the total number of polling engines you can have. So if you've got a SL2000 license you can have 2000 polling engines, although that would be a little over kill :-).
Mark
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0 rob.hock over 10 years ago

Have we perhaps looked at deploying FoE? http://www.solarwinds.com/extensions/failover.aspx
Good FoE overview: http://www.solarwinds.com/resources/videos/orion-failover-engine-overview.html
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0 mattoz over 10 years ago

We use FoE for our primary and additional engines (the additional poller is for scale, not redundancy), and NeverFail for the DB server (same technology). We keep one set of VMs in each data center. Cool stuff, although it will add time to your patching and updating processes.
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0 AlexSoul over 10 years ago in reply to rob.hock

This is great, thanks Rob... we are getting there. I haven't heard about FoE before and by the first look of it - it seems exactly what I was looking for
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0 AlexSoul over 10 years ago in reply to mattoz

mattoz, thank you for the clue. I have found the below PDF guide, which is explaining this solution in more details, specificity for Orion Database
http://www.lifeboatdistribution.com/Content/images/promotions/solarwinds/NF-for-Orion-Database-Solutions-Sheet-v2e.pdf
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