Deployment sizing guidelines for the SolarWinds Platform
This topic applies to all SolarWinds Platform products.
This topic provides recommendations for deploying multiple SolarWinds Platform products. These are guidelines only. You can choose to use more or less hardware, but your performance may vary depending on your deployment scenario.
If you have only one SolarWinds Platform module, see the system requirements for that module in the Success Center.
Use the SolarWinds Installer to run a System Check. You do not have to complete the installation to receive an install report. The installer runs a series of checks per product to verify that your server meets system requirements and recommendations. You will receive informational and warning messages that recommend actions and best practices to optimize performance.
Before you read on, answer the following questions:
- What is the size of the environment you want to monitor with the SolarWinds Platform?
- How many and which SolarWinds Platform products do you want do use to monitor your environment?
- Where do you want to deploy the SolarWinds Platform, in the cloud or on premises?
Size of monitored environment and SolarWinds Platform products installed
For the purposes of this article, "small environments" mean up to three modules from the following list:
- IPAM IP1000 - IP4000
- NCM DL50 - DL200
- NPM SL100 - SL500 (including up to 10 remote agents for QoE)
- SAM, based on license type
- Up to SAM100 (node-based licensing)
- AL150 or AL300 (component-based licensing)
- UDT UT2500 - 5000
- VMAN VMS8 - VMS64
If you use VMAN Recommendations, increase the total memory on the server by 4 GB. - VNQM IPSLA 5 - IPSLA 25 (up to 5,000 operations)
- WPM 5 - WPM 20
You can install Log Analyzer, NTA, or SCM as part of a small deployment, but it is not included in this configuration. Use the Medium Deployment guidelines for these SolarWinds Platform products.
For the purposes of this article, "medium environments" include the following modules:
- NPM SL500 - SL2000,
- NTA for NPM SL2000
- 50,000 FPS received sustained on the main polling engine
and 2 - 4 additional modules:
- IPAM IP16,000
- Log Analyzer LA10 - LA250
- NCM DL500 - DL1000
- SAM, based on license type
- SAM100 to SAM300 (node-based licensing)
- AL700 or AL1100 (component-based licensing)
- SCM SCM50 - SCM1000
- UDT UT10,000 - 25,000
- VMAN VMS112 - VMS320
If you use VMAN Recommendations, increase the total memory on the server by 8 GB. - VNQM IPSLA 25 - IPSLA 50 (up to 10,000 operations)
- WPM 50 - WPM 200
For the purposes of this article, "large environments" include the following modules:
- NPM SLX (with multiple polling engines)
- NTA for NPM SLX
- 50,000 FPS received sustained on the main polling engine
- Up to 6 polling engines (5 in addition to the main polling engine) for 300,000 FPS received sustained
- Any combination of these modules:
- IPAM IPX
- 750,000 IP
- Log Analyzer LA250 - LA1000
- NCM DLX
- 1 Additional Polling Engine (APE) for every 10,000 devices, for NCM 7.1 and later
- Maximum of 30,000 devices per NCM instance (that is, NCM server + 2 NCM APEs)
- SAM, based on license type
- SAM400 (node-based licensing)
- AL1500 (component-based licensing)
- SCM SCM5000
- UDT UTX
- 150,000 ports per polling engine
- VMAN VMS480 and higher
- Per VMAN Recommendations, increase the total memory on the server by 16 GB.
- 1 APE for every 10,000 VMs. VMAN APEs do not require extra licenses.
- VNQM IPX
- ~5,000 IP SLA operations per polling engine
- IPAM IPX
For the purposes of this article, "xlarge environments" monitor up to 1,000,000 elements. Monitoring these environments requires deploying Additional Polling Engines to scale your deployment.
For SAM, monitoring capacity is measured in terms of component monitors instead of elements.
For example, a SAM1000 deployment of SAM 2020.2 that uses WinRM for application monitor polling, represents an "xlarge" environment that supports:
- 1 Main Polling Engine (up to 10K component monitors) and up to 100 APEs.
- 1 APE for every ~40K component monitors at no extra licensing cost. Stacking is not supported.
- Up to 550K component monitors.
Disk Performance is measured using IOPS.
CPU recommendations use the PassMark score (© 2018 PassMark® Software, obtained at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html on April 9, 2018).
How do I find out the PassMark score of my server?
- Download the Pass Mark Performance Test (© 2018 PassMark® Software, obtained at https://www.passmark.com/products/pt.htm on April 9, 2018).
- Run it on your server to find out a PassMark score of your server.
SolarWinds Platform deployed in the cloud
SolarWinds Platform products support the following cloud solutions:
You can also deploy SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted directly from your cloud provider marketplace:
-
AWS Marketplace (© 2012-2023 Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates, available at https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-m6nxkzrixbv3i, obtained on April 18, 2023.)
-
Azure Marketplace (© 2019 Microsoft, available at https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/solarwinds.solarwinds-hybrid-cloud-observability?tab=Overview , obtained on April 18, 2023.)
Amazon Web Services
In Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes are not your dedicated hardware devices. For databases used by SolarWinds Platform products, SolarWinds recommends using dedicated instance EBS volumes for medium and large deployments. For large deployments, SolarWinds recommends EBS with provisioned IOPS for high performance for intensive database workloads.
To deploy your SolarWinds Platform using Amazon Web Service, consider using the following templates.
| Requirements |
Small (up to 500 elements) |
Medium (501-2,000 elements) |
Large (more than 2,000 elements) |
XL (up to 1,000,000 elements) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
SolarWinds Platform server |
m4.xlarge |
m4.2xlarge |
m5.2xlarge |
m5.4xlarge |
| SolarWinds Platform database using Amazon RDS for SQL Server | db.r5.xlarge | db.r5.2xlarge | db.r5.4xlarge | db.r5.16xlarge |
|
SolarWinds Platform database deployed on an Amazon VM |
r4.xlarge |
r4.2xlarge |
r5d.4xlarge |
r5ad.24xlarge |
| Additional Polling Engines | Only relevant for environments that monitor over 12,000 elements. |
m5.xlarge |
||
| Additional Web Servers |
Less than 50 concurrent users: m4.xlarge More than 50 concurrent users: m4.2xlarge or larger |
|||
| Requirements for additional databases | xl | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NTA Flow Storage Database | see medium | r3.xlarge | db.r5d.4xlarge | db.r5d.4xlarge |
| Log Analyzer Database | see medium | r3.xlarge | db.r5d.4xlarge | db.r5d.4xlarge |
Microsoft Azure
To deploy your SolarWinds Platform on Microsoft Azure, consider using the following instance types, based on your deployment size.
To create a new database or a new database user in the Configuration Wizard, use an account with appropriate privileges.
| Requirements |
Small (up to 500 elements) |
Medium (501-2,000 elements) |
Large (more than 2,000 elements) |
XL (up to 1,000,000 elements) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
SolarWinds Platform server |
D3_v2 |
D4_v2 |
DS4_v2 |
DS5_v2 |
| SolarWinds Platform database using Azure SQL DB |
All installed products must run on Orion Platform 2019.2 or later. Time zone setting of the SolarWinds Platform server must be in the same time zone as Azure SQL DB time zone (UTC). |
|||
|
DTU Standard Tier S3 or better vCore General Purpose Tier 2 or better |
DTU Standard Tier S3 or better vCore General Purpose Tier 2 or better |
DTU Standard Tier S4 or better vCore General Purpose Tier 2 or better |
DTU P15 vCore Hyper-Scale 40 vCPU |
|
| SolarWinds Platform database using Azure SQL Database managed instance |
Gen5 |
Gen5 |
Gen5 |
Gen5 |
|
SolarWinds Platform database deployed in an Azure VM |
A4_v2 |
DS4_v2 Standard |
E8s_v3 |
E64as_v4 IOPS 30,000+ |
| Additional Polling Engine | Only relevant for environments that monitor over 12,000 elements at default polling intervals. | D4s_v3 | D4s_v3 | |
| Additional Web Server |
Less than 50 concurrent users: DS12_v2 More than 50 concurrent users: DS4_v2 or larger |
|||
| Requirements for additional databases | xl | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NTA Flow Storage Database | - | DS12_v2 | D15_v2 | D15_v2 |
| Log Analyzer Database | - | DS12_v2 | D15_v2 | D15_v2 |
SolarWinds Platform deployed on premises
| Requirements |
Small |
Medium (501-2,000 elements) |
Large (more than 2,000 elements) |
XL (up to 1,000,000 elements) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted | ||||
| Minimum / Recommended | ||||
| SolarWinds Platform server hardware
|
CPU: 4 Cores / 8 Cores RAM: 16 GB / 32 GB |
CPU: 8 Cores / 12 Cores RAM: 32 GB / 64 GB |
||
|
SolarWinds Platform server software |
Windows Server 2025 Windows Server 2022 Windows Server 2019 Windows Server 2016 Desktop OS's only for evaluations; NOT recommended for production environments
FIPS-compliant OS's STIG- compliant OS's Device Guard-compliant OS's |
|||
| SolarWinds Platform database server
|
Production environment requirements
Recommended:
Supported:
|
|||
|
Quad core processor or better 8 GB/16 GB RAM 20 GB/40 GB HD |
Dual quad core processor or better 16 GB/64 GB RAM 50 GB/100 GB HD |
Dual quad core processor or better 64 GB/128 GB RAM 100/400 GB HD
|
CPUs with a total combined PassMark score of 32,000 or higher 256 GB/512 GB RAM 2 TB HD Read/Write I/O: 30,000 IOPs / 190,000 IOPS or better recommended, SSD strongly recommended |
|
| Additional Polling Engines |
CPU: 4 Cores / 8 Cores RAM: 16 GB / 32 GB |
CPU: 8 Cores / 12 Cores RAM: 32 GB / 64 GB |
||
|
Windows Server 2022 Windows Server 2019 Windows Server 2016 |
||||
| Additional Web Server | Relevant for environments where the number of concurrent users is close to 50. |
8-core processor or better 16 GB RAM 60 GB HD Windows Server 2022 Windows Server 2019 Windows Server 2016
Requirements depend on the number of concurrent users. The more users are logged in at the same time, the more RAM, HD space, and cores you need. |
||
|
Ports to open
|
Outbound: 22, 25, 465, 587, 1433, 1434, Inbound: 80, 162, 443, 514, 17778 Bi-directional: 53, 135, 161, 5671, 17777 |
|||
| Account privileges |
SolarWinds recommends that SolarWinds Platform administrators have local administrator privileges on the SolarWinds Platform server to ensure full functionality of local SolarWinds tools. User accounts limited to the SolarWinds Platform Web Console do not require local administrator privileges. Users running the Configuration wizard must have DBO specified as the default database schema.
All SolarWinds services run under the LocalSystem account in order to protect critical and sensitive information, such as primary SolarWinds Platform certificates, or database credentials, from being accessed by shared accounts with lower privileges. |
|||
| Latency |
The latency (RTT) between each SolarWinds Platform engine and the database server should be below 200 ms. Degradation may begin around 100 ms, depending on your utilization and the size of your deployment. In general, higher latency will impact larger deployments more than smaller deployments. Ping the SolarWinds Platform SQL Server to find the current latency and ensure a reliable static connection between the server and the regions. |
|||
| Other | Localization constraints: German and Japanese only for SolarWinds Platform, NPM, NTA, LA, NCM, SAM, and VMAN Calendar constraints: Gregorian calendar only |
|||
| Requirements for additional databases | xl | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NTA Flow Storage Database | - |
Physical server or virtual machine
|
||
| Log Analyzer Database | - |
Physical server or virtual machine
|
||
RAID recommendations are only relevant if your primary database is deployed on a physical server. They are NOT relevant if your database is deployed on a virtual machine.
More or less space may be needed depending on your data retention policies, number of elements measured, and polling frequency.
| RAID recommendations | ||
|---|---|---|
| RAID 1+0 configuration (RAID 5 not supported) |
RAID 1+0 configuration (RAID 5 not supported) Hardware RAID Controller (software RAID not supported) |
|