Unmanaged vs External

Unmanaging and Remanaging Nodes: (This would explain Unmanaged Node)

Unmanaged Nodes are nodes which are already managed by Solarwinds but you want to stop monitoring on them for certain period of time - (When you Unmanage the node you can specify the time till when you don't want to monitor the same)

When you need to perform maintenance on nodes, such as upgrading firmware, installing new hardware, or updating security, you may want SolarWinds to discontinue downloading configurations and reporting information about the nodes while the devices are down. Unmanaging nodes while node maintenance is being performed helps maintain the accuracy of your data and prevents unnecessary and inaccurate reports.

Another reason to unmanage a node is if you want to keep configuration files for a decommissioned device. Configuration data for unmanaged nodes will remain in the SolarWinds database.

Monitoring External Nodes (This would explain External Node)

External Nodes are nodes which are not managed by Solarwinds.(Its just a dummy node which does not collect any data)

To monitor services and applications on a server you do not directly manage, add the server to the SolarWinds database as an external node. External nodes skip all network performance data collection and polling tasks, but allow you to assign applications to them.

Example - You need to monitor a couple of url's like say www.google.com, you add an external node EN to Solarwinds and you assign a App template to EN. Your App Template will contain the http monitor you want to monitor (www.google.com).

Hope this helps

If you put a device in an unmanaged state, does that mean it is still counting towards the polling limit within NPM? As I want to keep historical data for some decommissioned equipment, and I have put it into a non managed state

When you put a node in an unmanaged state, it is still a licensed node. So, it will count towards the licensing of the node, it's interfaces, etc. However, since it would not be polling actively during the unmanaged duration, I don't believe it contributes to the polling rate during that time.

I make use of external nodes for BGP peers -- I can assign IP addresses to them to grok which peer has gone down.

I'm thinking of using them to represent APs and a little bit of SQL code so I can manage Thin Access points as if they were nodes, because the current Thin Access point management is non-existent.

Is there a way to add these without an IP address?  It's tough to ping a cabinet, and it feels a little odd/arbitrary tracking used loopback addresses for that purpose.

You would require an IP to add them though, what exactly are you trying to monitor through SAM ? Why do you need an external node in your environment ? If you could let me know it would help me a bit

Saw another post from you - "Adding non-IP objects as external nodes" cool

In my case, I've been tasked with using SolarWinds' report writer to build a rack report of one of our data centers (I agree that SolarWinds isn't the best place to do it, that's just the task that's been handed to me), and I need to include the free spaces and non-IP devices.  Trouble is, there's a bunch of them, so I need to add them in bulk.

Ideally, would you look to be able to build a rack-elevation diagram in Orion (including the non-IP physical devices)?

Complete with shoe rack and tea cosy