Is there a best practice strategy for this? We have a brand new installation of Solarwinds and it's already loaded up after 2 weeks of adding systems. I chose the easy route and split up the polling by technology, It almost works except we have double the Windows servers as we do anything else. Here are our polling engine % utilizations and node counts
Primary Polling Engine - 43% load Network, VMware, and Storage nodes
APE 1 - 83% load Unix/Linux Nodes
APE 2 - 87% load Windows nodes
APE 3 - 0% load Nodes yet.
This is NPM/Virtualization polling only.
For planning purposes, we haven't added SAM application monitoring yet, so I could easily see use having enough app monitors( IIS, Exchange, SQL Server, and other apps ) to add 43% load in the next month. I could assign those to APE 3, but APE 2's load is already bothering me since I have a lot more Windows servers to add, around 25% more than we have now.
How does every balance their polling ?
For Windows/Linux servers, I do not poll loopbacks interfaces or removable storage devices, but I included network drives. Should I drop network drives?
For switches, I limited polling to uplink interfaces and loopback interfaces, so I think we are good there.