Total flow count in Orion NTA??

You can use performance counters for NTA service.

e.g.>

run perfmon

add counters from category SolarWinds NetFlow

you are interested in counters PDUs Procesed and PDUs Received

Unfortunatelly this is only for actual instance of netflow service.

That is exactly what I needed.  Actually, the PDU per second.  Thank you!

So, is ~1200 PDUs per second a lot?  Because this is only from a single Packetshaper...

That is a fair amount.  To give you an idea, in our stress testing, we begin our lowest tests with 9000 PDUs per second and go up from there.  Of course it all depends, mainly on your SQL hardware and if this is just for one node, it wouldn't take many before you would get into a "stressed" situation.  (Assuming your SQL hardware is like our lab machines)

You may want to monitor the Performance Counters on the SQL machine to get an idea of how it is handling it as you add more nodes for the NTA service to collect from.

Thanks,
David

Thanks David.  The primary polling engine seems to be handling those numbers fine.  The only problem is that the NetFlowService.exe service on the polling engine continues to consume more and more memory until it eventually crashes (I suspect this is because it is throttling how fast it writes to the SQL db based on what that server load is).  I was told in a different thread to open a case about this and will be doing so later today.

I've known that our SQL server has needed an upgrade since working with you last time.  Work is progressing on that front.  I may do a test with one of our SANs or simply order a new server with better disks.  :-)

Yes, disks have time and time again been shown to be the bottleneck of performance for our customers (as well as in our tests).  You mentioned that I have worked with you before, but I haven't associated you with your Thwack name.  Did I have you throttle back the checkpointing that SQL server does?  It would have been where we added a startup parameter on the SQL Server service of -k.  It is something that has continued to help customers who have a SQL Server that is stressed in its disk I/O. 

Anyhow, yes, still persue upgrading the hardware and do open a support ticket.  Then we'll see what we can do to fix your problem. 

BTW, we know that we have a problem here with the NTA service's memory growing in excess and we're testing some fixes and look for other causes as well.

Thanks,
David

Hi David.  It may have been a different David that I worked with before.  It was on NPM issues that were related to my SQL db disks being the bottleneck.  Nothing to do with NTA.

I will open the case in a bit.  Thanks again to you all for taking the time to answer questions here.

Anyhow, yes, still persue upgrading the hardware and do open a support ticket.  Then we'll see what we can do to fix your problem.

David,

Case #94908 opened.  Would you mind emailing/calling me on this when you have a moment?

How exactly do you add the SolarWinds NetFlow category/counters in perfmon?

Our NTA module is running on a Windows Server 2008 box and unfortunately I have no expereince with perfmon.

TIA

Just go to Start -> Run and type in perfmon and follow the info above.

I know how to launch perfmon but how do I  "add counters from category SolarWinds NetFlow"?

Below is the screen I see when I launch perfmon on the NPM/NCM/NTA server (we have a seperate SQL server).