Since I have seen several posts regarding last poll data being stale in recent days I figured I would post what I did to help keep my team on top of this problem.
I didn't have the budget to give me the beast of a SQL server that is truly needed to handle polling of 18000 elements so I would often run into issues with polling data lagging behind. There are several posts about how to correct this issue when you find it so I'm not going to address that this is more to help you stay on top of this issue and identify the lag when it is say 30 minutes in the past and not 2 days.
I created a very simple report in which I chose one node that I considered stable (usually something within the same network as Solarwinds) on each polling engine.
The report consisted of 4 items.
Node Name, Polling Engine, Last poll time, last database update
This report was then added to the main Solarwinds page that we had displayed on our NOC and the main page for the user views so that it was always in front of my team. This helped myself and members of my team to see this information and notice any potential lags and get them resolved before we had a real problem on our hands.
Like I said this isn't a fix for this problem or a cure for an overwhelmed polling environment but if you have this issue on a regular basis like I did it allows you to stay on top of it and correct before you have a major issue. Purging 30 minutes of data from your queues is much more acceptable then losing 2 days worth.
Mike.