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Can the SAM Application Polling Rate be scaled?

jburke over 5 years ago

We are currently showing a SAM polling rate of 95% on one of our additional polling servers. Generally we rebalance the load to keep them lower but I figured I'd use this as an opportunity to look at exactly what is going on with this.

Resource-wise, this polling server has 8 Cores and 16GB and is showing 38% CPU usage and 49% memory usage. Network traffic is averaging around 10MBPS Send, 15MBPS Receive so that is not saturated at all. Highest process using memory is the SolarWinds.Collector.Service with 1.5GB CPU is mostly idle (63% on average).

It would seem that the SAM polling rate is not affected by resource availability since the server has quite a lot of excess capacity but the SAM polling rate is still at 95%.

For the WPM Players we have been able to adjust the settings to allow for far more synthetic transactions per player then it could support out of the box by adding threads and using more server resources. Are there any settings that would allow us to increase resources available to SAM and therefore increase the SAM polling rate? We do not want to cut the current monitoring levels to reduce the polling rate which is really what most of the solutions I have read are. We currently have 8 additional polling servers on this instance and will probably be adding a couple more in the next few months so we are trying to get the best utilization of resources we can, so if we can scale up the polling servers to use additional resources that is a big help.

If not, I will probably decrease the CPU core count and memory at the next upgrade since it is mostly idle since it is a waste of resources to have these polling servers overbuilt if they are maxed out in what they can do with half the resources.

Any ideas on this would be appreciated.

Thanks

-Jim

0 vinay.by over 5 years ago

Hi jburke
I am assuming you have a SAM ALX license (unlimited).
1. SAM polling rate doesn't actually consider the excess resourcing that's available on the server, its more to do with the application limit itself, as per Scalability engine guidelines 8-10K component monitors on each SAM instance (the polling rate that you are currently viewing is linked to this).
Scalability Engine Guidelines for SolarWinds Orion Products - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support
2. With respect to the resources on the server - you could always refer to the optimal resourcing required for SAM (in case you have multiple modules installed refer to Hardware specs required for multiple modules
SAM system requirements
But, but if you are actually trying to tell us the resourcing was built on the same spec and its still not being used by SAM then it truly makes sense, probably then we might have to talk to solarwinds on what basis was this 8k to 10k component limit set (they might have baselined this based on the component monitors that uses max resources on the server - probably this might as well vary based on the type of component monitors that's enabled in our environment)
Hope it helps
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0 jburke over 5 years ago in reply to vinay.by

Hi Vinay,

Thanks for the quick reply. Yes, we have ALX licenses.

The polling server is built with more then the minimum requirements for a large implementation but it doesn't seem to matter how many resources you throw at it since the SAM polling rate seems to be a fixed number.

Currently the polling server looks like this:

ENGINE STATUS	Polling Engine Active
TYPE OF POLLING ENGINE	Additional
POLLING ENGINE VERSION	SolarWinds Orion Core Services 2017.3
INSTALLER LANGUAGE SELECTION	English
OPERATING SYSTEM REGIONAL SETTING	English

LAST DATABASE SYNC	9 seconds ago
POLLING COMPLETION	99.99
ELEMENTS	5371
NETWORK NODE ELEMENTS	1361
VOLUME ELEMENTS	3023
INTERFACE ELEMENTS	987
SAM APPLICATION POLLING RATE	95% of its maximum rate.Polling intervals increase if the polling rate exceeds 100% of the maximum rate.ADD POLLER » Learn more
POLLING RATE	44% of its maximum rate.» Learn more
TOTAL JOB WEIGHT	3765
NUMBER OF HW HEALTH MONITORS	0
NUMBER OF HW HEALTH SENSORS	0

The polling rate is only 44% but the SAM polling rate is 95% which makes me think we are hitting a hard coded limit imposed by software not a resource issue.

If that's the case, there's no point in putting resources higher than the minimums for a large implementation because it will never use them and they don't get us any additional utility from the polling server.

I guess I'm hoping for a reg hack or something to allow the SAM polling rate to be increased to take advantage of the additional resources but alternatively, I can recover unused resources on the polling servers which helps with budgeting.

-Jim