NPN Poller Per Second - Gaps in data

You are probably over-sampling the statistics data. By increasing the polling ~10X you deminish the scalability of the Orion server ~10X. The adjusted element count (for polling frequency) is ~15K and pollers don't do well with more than ~9K.

I suggest carefully examining the need to poll so frequently. If there are critical interfaces or nodes where you believe you need to poll at 1 min I would set those up for 1 min (assuming there are just a handfull of these) and return the polling for all else to the defaults.

Our requirements are at least 1 minute for interface statistics and would really want more granular than 1 minute if available. a 5 minute average does not show nearly the bandwidth peaks in a bursty traffic environment.

If we need 1 minute statistics would an additional poller help?   When these gaps happen on the busy interfaces other interfaces do not show gap at all.  IS it the case that Orion gets too busy and can not calculate the large bandwidth numbers when its busy?

I recommend you run a test on two similar interfaces and poll 1 at 1 min and 1 at 5 min. I have done this to demonstrate to clients that the data is almost identical. You can see shorter peaks with 1 min but the question there is what is the value of seeing these peaks? Short peaks with a rapid recovery are common and don't impact performance.  It is a trade off between the cost of rapid polling and the value of the data. For LAN interfaces 1 min polling has no value, so you could set the WAN interfaces to 1 min and keep LAN at 9 min and save a lot of $ in extra pollers and data storage. OK - I'm off my soap box now.... ;)

For the high speed interfaces make sure you are using 64 bit counters. This setting is in the admin manage nodes interface and is set per node. This will keep the counters from experiencing rapid roll-over.

Your adjusted element count for 1 minute polling is about 8 to 10 times greater than the actual element count so an additional poller will off load the polling and eliminate the gaps. Here is a doc on gaps and one on Orion Performance that may be helpful.

I agree in allot of places 5 minutes would be good.  Our data is all time sensitive and bursty.  We get haunted by microbursts all day.  We will have 1G interfaces running at ~100M of bandwidth then a microburst can max the interface for a few seconds then go back to ~100M.

Are the 64 bit counters in a certain Version?  We are still running V9.51 since our last upgrade attempt failed.

I found the 64bit counters box.  I will try that this evening.