Stacked APEs

our APE servers appear to have spare CPU and memory -- if I needed additional polling power then stacking might make sense. If you're in a virtual environment and MS licences are cheap it might not...

Correct, the only real reason is in your main polling engine is nearing 100%.

I answered my own question here, and discovered the Stacked Poller solution to be very effective...the load is cut by the % of the number of pollers you have...I highly recommend going this route if you need to increase your performance without implementing new hardware

Could you please explain what is Stacked APE?

A stacked APE (Additional Polling Engine) is a feature that SolarWinds has where you can install up to 3 instances of the modules on one host...It is an efficient way to basically have 3 servers in 1...since each polling engine can handle ~10,000 elements per installation, this fundamentally triples the hosts efficiency. 

For instance we have 1 main poller license and 10 APE licenses...the main poller will always be a single instance, but then you can use the APE bundle to install 3 times on a second host...giving you 4 times the monitoring power on only 2 Windows hosts. 

It works really well BTW...I have fully tested the viability of this and we will be using it in production.john.ta​

I understand what you are saying, but I don't understand the benefit.  Why wouldn't you just purchase a single APE license and put all the nodes on that instead of running multiple instances on the same host?  The way I understand number of elements an installation can handle depends on resources, if you give all the resources to a single instance then what's the difference?

Funny, when I came into this project I had that same question...the biggest benefit is administration and operating system cost...getting 3 for 1 out of a MS 20xx host is more efficient when you consider using 10 hosts over 30..also when it comes to # of elements an install can handle, the relationship is linear to your polling time...the default of 10,000 elements is correlated to polling cycle of 10 minutes...so if you changed your polling cycle to 5 minutes, the # of elements the poller can handle is ~5000...(although in my testing I think these #'s should be closer to 12,000/6000)...another factor that I like is that I only have to maintain 10 hosts instead of 20-30...this really hits you when you're upgrading or applying patches

Overall, let's not forget SW is in it to make money, so when they say 1 APE can only handle 10,000 elements, they could probably just multi-thread the application to handle 30,000, but instead they sell APE licenses to create the multi-thread.

These #'s are true too...I tested by having 200 devices pointing to a single APE and the Polling Rate would get cut by the respective amount based on if I added 1 or 2 extra APEs with a 50% or 66% reduction respectively.

How many nodes are you monitoring?

john.ta​

I currently have 4500 nodes with over 60,000 elements across 6 polling engines.  Each their own node, but all reside on same blade.

jxchappell wrote: Overall, let's not forget SW is in it to make money, so when they say 1 APE can only handle 10,000 elements, they could probably just multi-thread the application to handle 30,000, but instead they sell APE licenses to create the multi-thread. john.ta

Then they shouldn't sell Unlimited licenses.  We should be able to use all the capacity of our hardware is we have unlimited licenses.  I have 6 physical pollers, and 2 of them are stacked.  They are barely taxed, but I have to buy more APE licenses.  Additional pollers should be free if you bought the license.  That the way most of the competitors work.

I can also poll the same amount of elements on 2 servers with a competitors product.  I have evaluated way too many.

Solarwinds says they are cheaper than the competition, but not when you try to scale it out.

Ran into this myself, I agree 100%. Explaining to management that "unlimited" licenses were in fact subject to a limitation was fun.