Best practices for monitoring lots of the same APM components

Hi, Rane.

You can assign a common template to a certain class of server nodes -- based on the operating system in your case -- and then assign additional templates to the same servers based on their specific functions.  There's no problem at all doing this.

Actually, I would go as far as to say we would prefer you do it that way, as it requires less work to set up and to maintain. 

Is there a upper limit on how many servers should be on a APM app? We have 64 citrix blades and they are each monitored for 18 APM components. We broke these into two APM templates and split them up so as to not overload. if we went with a windows APM (10 or so somponents) and applied it to each of our 400 or so windows servers would that be too much? or would it be better to do 1 component at a time and assign it to all the servers as needed? or something in-between?

Each application is one "job" to our poller, so splitting them into two templates doesn't reduce the load.  It slightly increases the load. 

You should arrange your components into templates that are meaningful to how you want to manage your apps.  Don't worry about scalability.

Ultimately, the total number of components does matter because each one represents data that must be processed and stored.  So assuming 10+ components per application, you should be able to do 8000+ components with a single poller.  So you're setup is getting near the upper limit of a single poller.  To scale up beyond that, you'll need to buy another poller.