Documentation forSolarWinds Platform

SolarWinds Platform requirements

This topic applies to all SolarWinds Platform products.

Requirements depend on various variables, such as:

  • SolarWinds Platform deployment in the cloud vs on premises.
  • Size of the environment to be monitored. This topic provides requirements for small, medium, large and extra large deployments, based on the number of monitored elements, such as nodes, interfaces, or component monitors, based on your license. See Licensing model for SolarWinds Platform products.
  • Review your product Administrator Guides and release notes for the exact product requirements beyond these minimums.
  • SolarWinds recommends reviewing the latest SolarWinds Platform Release Notes.
  • SolarWinds does not provide a comprehensive list of all supported devices. If your device supports standard SNMP MIB2, it can be monitored with the SolarWinds Platform. See Supported vendors and devices.

What requirements are you looking for?

Amazon Web Service

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

Microsoft Azure

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
4 vCores

Gen5
8 vCores

Gen5
16 vCores

Gen5
40 vCores

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

On premises

To deploy a single SolarWinds Platform product locally, on a server, review the following recommendations.

The minimum/recommended requirements are based on the most common element distribution (nodes, volumes, and interfaces) and polling technology used (ICMP/SNMPv2). Using more secure and advanced polling methods (SolarWinds Platform Agent, WMI, or SNMPv3), and more complex element types (applications, firewalls, load balancers, wireless controllers) can increase hardware requirements for the server beyond the recommendations.

Requirements

Small
(up to 500 elements)

Medium

(501-2,000 elements)

Large

(more than 2,000 elements)

XL (up to 1,000,000 elements)

Hybrid Cloud Observability Essentials

Hybrid Cloud Observability Advanced
Minimum / Recommended
SolarWinds Platform server hardware

 

More details

CPU: 4 Cores / 8 Cores

RAM: 16 GB / 32 GB

CPU: 8 Cores / 12 Cores

RAM: 32 GB / 64 GB

SolarWinds Platform server software

More details

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More details

Production environment requirements

  • In production environments, the SolarWinds Platform server and the SolarWinds Platform database must use separate servers (physical or virtual machine). For details on SQL Express, see MS SQL Express limits.
  • If you have your SQL Server deployed on a virtual machine, you must maintain SolarWinds Platform database on a separate physical drive.

Recommended:

  • For XL environments, use SQL Server Enterprise 2019 CU4 and later on Windows Server 2019

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

 

More details

Outbound: 22, 25, 465, 587, 1433, 1434,

Inbound: 80, 162, 443, 514, 17778

Bi-directional: 53, 135, 161, 5671, 1777

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.

More information on hardware recommendations for the SolarWinds Platform server

Use the recommended hardware configuration to avoid potential performance issues caused by a heavy load or custom configurations such as increased data retention or more frequent polling intervals.

RAID recommendations only apply to physical environments. If you have your SolarWinds Platform server installed on a virtual machine, these recommendations do not apply to your environment.

Processor speed

Use processors that work at 2.4 GHz or faster.

CPU

Do not enable Physical Address Extension (PAE).

HD

Two 146 GB 15K (RAID 1/Mirrored Settings) hard drives are recommended with a dedicated drive for the server operating system and SolarWinds installation.

Some common files may need to be installed on the same drive as your server operating system. You may want to move or expand the Windows temporary directories.

More information on software requirements for the SolarWinds Platform server

Do not install SolarWinds Platform products on the same server as SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM).

The following table lists software requirements and recommendations for a SolarWinds installation on both physical and virtual computers.

Software Requirements
Operating system
  • Windows Server 2022
  • Windows Server 2019
  • Windows Server 2016

Desktop operating systems, such as Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit Pro or Enterprise, are supported for evaluation environments only. To make a smooth transition from your evaluation to production deployment, SolarWinds recommends that you avoid installing evaluations on desktop operating systems.

Support differences between SolarWinds Platform Agents and SolarWinds Platform products

  • You cannot install SolarWinds Platform products on domain controllers. Exception: You can install SolarWinds Platform Agents on domain controllers.
  • You cannot install SolarWinds Platform products or any scalability engines on Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, or BlackBerry servers. Exception: You can install SolarWinds Platform Agents on the same server as a Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange or Research in Motion (RIM) Blackberry server.
Operating system languages
  • English (UK or US)
  • German
  • Japanese
  • Simplified Chinese

IP address version

IPv4

IPv6

Dual stack

CIDR notation is not supported for IPv6 addresses.

Web server

If you are not using Windows Authentication, make sure the Anonymous Authentication is enabled for the SolarWinds NetPerfMon website. Anonymous Authentication is used with the default forms-based authentication.

IIS is activated by the Configuration Wizard. You can install this software manually to reduce your installation time.

.NET Framework

.NET 4.8

Run the same version of .NET on your primary server and any Additional polling engines or Additional web servers in the environment.

Make sure that the operating system of your SolarWinds Platform supports .NET 4.8. See .NET Framework system requirements (© 2019 Microsoft, available at https://dotnet.microsoft.com, obtained on October 3, 2019).

If your SolarWinds product runs on an operating system that does not support .NET 4.8, consider upgrading your environment to be able to use new features.

More details on requirements for the SolarWinds Platform database Server

During installation, SolarWinds Platform creates the following three databases:

  • SolarwindsOrion - Primary SolarWinds Platform database.

  • SolarwindsOrionLog - Database used for logging syslogs, traps, and other log data.

  • SolarwindsFlowStorage - Database used for storing flow data.

The default names of the databases can be modified during installation.

Before upgrading from Orion Platform 2020.2.6 and earlier to SolarWinds Platform 2022.3 or later, make sure the database user you use to connect to your SQL Server has the db create privilege. Without this privilege, the upgrade will not complete.

SQL Server versions

Use Standard or Enterprise editions of the following SQL versions. Support for Microsoft SQL Server Service Packs and Cumulative Updates is assumed unless otherwise noted.

Supported versions

  • SQL Server 2022 (including installations on Linux)
  • SQL Server 2019 (including installations on Linux)
  • SQL Server 2017 (including installations on Linux)
  • SQL Server 2016 SP1 or SP2

Which SQL Server edition to use?

  • For XL environments, use only Enterprise versions.
  • Express editions are supported only for evaluations.

Recommendations

  • To achieve optimal performance, use SQL 2016 SP1 or later. Earlier SQL versions do not support the columnstore index and are thus not recommended for larger deployments.
  • Use the Simple database recovery mode to ensure best performance.
  • Use 64-bit version of SQL Server.
  • You can set the database recovery model to Full Recovery if your SolarWinds Platform database is hosted on a SQL Cluster or if you use Always On Availability. However, you must back up your database regularly and ensure that volume you store your transaction log has free space that is at least equal to or greater than the size of your SolarWinds Platform database. Your transaction logs will continue to grow indefinitely until a database backup is performed and the transactions committed to the database. We recommend daily database backups when you use the Full Recovery model.

MS SQL Express Limits

Starting with 2022.3, Express editions of supported MS SQL Server versions are not supported for production environment. Express editions are only supported for evaluation purposes.

MS SQL Express can be installed on the same server as the SolarWinds Platform server.

When using MS SQL Express, make sure you are aware of the following limits:

Feature Limit
Maximum database size 10 GB

Maximum computing capacity used by a single instance - SQL Server Database Engine

Maximum computing capacity used by a single instance - Analysis Services or Reporting Services

Limited to lesser of 1 socket or 4 cores
Maximum memory for buffer pool per instance of SQL Server Database Engine 1410 MB
Maximum memory for Columnstore segment cache per instance of SQL Server Database Engine 352 MB
Maximum memory-optimized data size per database in SQL Server Database Engine 352 MB
SolarWinds Platform groups up to 100 groups
SolarWinds Platform concurrent users up to 5 users logged in simultaneously
SolarWinds Platform performance Complex groups, limitations, or alerts can affect performance of your deployment.

SQL Server Collation

The SolarWinds Platform does not support case-sensitive databases.

The SolarWinds Platform supports CI database on an CS SQL Server.

  • English with collation setting SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
  • English with collation setting SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS
  • German with collation setting German_PhoneBook_CI_AS
  • Japanese with collation setting Japanese_CI_AS
  • Simplified Chinese with collation setting Chinese_PRC_CI_AS

Server roles and permissions

Required server roles:

  • dbcreator
  • public
  • securityadmin


Permissions:

  • You need read permissions to the master database.
  • You don't need dbcreator permissions if you are installing a SolarWinds Platform product with a pre-existing blank database.

Hard drive space

The following recommendations apply to physical environments only. If you have your SolarWinds Platform database installed on a virtual machine, these recommendations do not apply to your environment.

  • Due to intense I/O requirements, a RAID 1+0 drive is strongly recommended for the SolarWinds database, data, and log files with a dedicated drive for the server operating system and tempdb files.
  • Other RAID configurations can negatively affect your SQL Server's performance.
  • Mirrored drives for the OS and RAID 1+0 for database data files are recommended.
  • Solid state drives (SSD) are recommended for all components.

Some common files may need to be installed on the same drive as your server operating system. You may want to move or expand the Windows or SQL temporary directories. For more information, see Working with Temporary Directories.

Database hardware recommendations for large environments

For large environments with a physical SQL Server, SolarWinds recommends the following hard drive configuration.

These recommendations are not relevant for SQL Servers running in a virtual environment.

  • A hardware RAID Controller with a battery backed-up write back cache
  • Disk Subsystem 1 Array 1: 2x 146 GB 15K disks RAID 1 (mirroring) for the OS
  • Disc Subsystem 2 Array 2: 2x 146 GB 15K disks RAID 1 (Pagefile + Extra Storage)
  • Disk Subsystem 3 Array 3: with 6x 15k 146 GB or 300 GB disks configured in a RAID 1+0 array for your SQL MDF and FILEGROUPS.
  • Disk Subsystem 4 Array 4: with 4x 15k 146 GB or 300 GB disks configured in a RAID 1+0 array for your SQL LDF Transaction LOG file
  • Disk Subsystem 5 Array 5: with 4x 15k 146 GB or 300 GB disks configured in a RAID 1+0 array for your tempdb data file
  • Disk Subsystem 6 Array 6: with 4x 15k 146 GB or 300 GB disks configured in a RAID 0 array for your tempdb log file

Authentication

Either mixed-mode or Windows authentication. If you require SQL authentication, you must enable mixed mode on your SQL server.

Other software

SolarWinds recommends you install the SQL Server Management Studio component on your SolarWinds Platform database server.

The SolarWinds Installer installs the following required x86 components if they are not found on your SolarWinds Platform database server:

  • SQL Server System Common Language Runtime (CLR) Types. SolarWinds Platform uses secure SQL CLR stored procedures for selected, non-business data operations to improve overall performance.
  • Microsoft SQL Server Native Client
  • Microsoft SQL Server Management Objects

You cannot share the SolarWinds Platform database with Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, and Research in Motion (RIM) BlackBerry servers.

Server port requirements

  • Ports 4369, 25672, and 5671 are opened by default on the main server for RabbitMQ messaging. These ports can be blocked by the firewall. When running SolarWinds High Availability, ensure ports 4369 and 25672 are open.
  • RPC ports > 1024 (TCP, bidirectional) is used by the Job Engine v2 process to communicate with Windows nodes.

SolarWinds does not recommend the use of HTTP (Port 80). Please use HTTPS (Port 443) to ensure that any web-related connections are secure.

Port Protocol Service/Process Direction Description Encryption
user-defined, default: 22 SSH

SolarWinds Job Engine v2

IIS

Outbound from the SolarWinds Platform server to the device Port for accessing ASA devices through CLI Device-based

25

TCP

SolarWinds Alerting Service V2 Outbound

SMTP port for non-encrypted messages

n/a
53 UDP SolarWinds Job Engine v2 Bi-
directional
Resolving DNS queries n/a

80

TCP

IIS Inbound

HTTP default for the SolarWinds Platform Web Console website.

If you specify any port other than 80, you must include that port in the URL used to access the SolarWinds Platform Web Console. For example, if you specify an IP address of 192.168.0.3 and port 8080, the URL used to access the web console is http://192.168.0.3:8080.

The port might also be used for Cisco UCS monitoring.

No
135 TCP Microsoft EPMAP (DCE/RPC Locator service) Bi-
directional
Required for devices polled via WMI. Used to initiate communication with the remotely managed host.  

161

UDP

SolarWinds Job Engine v2

SolarWinds Cortex

Bi-
directional

Send and receive SNMP
information

SNMP v1 and v2 are unencrypted. SNMP v3 uses AES and 3DES encryption.

162

UDP

SolarWinds Trap Service

SNMP Informs

Inbound

Receive trap messages

n/a

443

TCP

IIS Inbound

Default port for https binding.

SSL

465

TCP

SolarWinds Alerting Service V2 Outbound

SMTP port used to send TLS-enabled email alert actions

SSL

514

UDP

SolarWinds Syslog Service Inbound

Receive syslog messages

n/a

587

TCP

SolarWinds Alerting Service V2 Outbound

SMTP port used to send TLS-enabled email alert actions

TLS

1433

TCP

SolarWinds Alerting Service V2

SolarWinds Administration Service

SolarWinds Information Service

SolarWinds Information Service V3

SolarWinds Orion Module Engine

Outbound

Communication between the SolarWinds Platform server and the SQL Server.

n/a

1434

UDP

SolarWinds Alerting Service V2

SolarWinds Administration Service

SolarWinds Information Service

SolarWinds Information Service V3

SolarWinds Orion Module Engine

SQL Server Browse Service

Outbound

Communication with the SQL Server Browser Service to determine how to communicate with certain non-standard SQL Server installations. Required only if your SQL Server is configured to use dynamic ports.

n/a

5671

TCP

RabbitMQ

Bi-
directional

For encrypted RabbitMQ messaging (AMQP/TLS) into the main polling engine from all SolarWinds Platform servers (additional polling engines, HA servers, or additional web servers).

Sending messages to RabbitMQ.

TLS 1.2

17777

TCP

SolarWinds Orion Module Engine

SolarWinds Information Service

SolarWinds Information Service V3

SolarWinds Cortex

Bi-
directional

Communication between services and SolarWinds Orion module traffic.

Communication between the SolarWinds Platform Web Console and the polling engines.

Communication between the main server and pool members.

RSA handshake, AES 256 communication using WCF

TLS 1.2 with Cortex

17774

HTTPS

SolarWinds REST Endpoint Inbound to the SolarWinds Platform server

Required for access to the SWIS API.

SolarWinds recommends that you start using port 17774 instead of 17778.

SSL

17778

HTTPS

SolarWinds Agent Inbound to the SolarWinds Platform server

Required for agent communication.

SSL

See SolarWinds Port requirements for a comprehensive list of port requirements for SolarWinds products.

Optional, individual components, such as SolarWinds Platform Agents and High Availability, have additional port requirements.

SolarWinds Platform Web Console browser requirements

Performance of the computer where you open the browser significantly influences the speed of the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

SolarWinds Platform supports two most recent versions of the following web browsers available at the release date:

  • Firefox
  • Chrome 

SolarWinds Platform also supports the following browsers:

  • Microsoft Edge

Browser requirements:

  • JavaScript enabled
  • Cookies enabled