Documentation forServer & Application Monitor
Monitoring your applications and environment is a key capability of Hybrid Cloud Observability and is also available in a standalone module, Server & Application Monitor (SAM). Hybrid Cloud Observability and SAM are built on the self-hosted SolarWinds Platform.

SAM API Poller Template Guide

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You can use the API Poller feature to monitor metrics via external REST APIs, providing an easier way to collect data from a modern application stack.

This guide describes how to use API poller templates to create API pollers on nodes that capture metrics for PaaS, IaaS, on-premises, and hybrid environments from Microsoft 365, Azure, VMware, Atlassian, and other APIs. Templates are also available to tighten SAM's integration with SolarWinds products such as AppOptics, Pingdom, and Service Desk.

New to REST APIs? Watch Intro to APIs for people who hate to program and API Pollers: When SNMP Won't Cut It.

To get started using an API Poller template:

  1. Review template requirements. For example, gather OAuth 2.0 Azure credentials to create an API poller based on the Microsoft Azure SQL Database API poller template.
  2. Navigate to the Node Details view for the node where you're assigning one or more templates.
  3. In the Management widget, click API Poller Management > Assign.
  4. When the Assign API Pollers wizard opens, select the template(s) you're adding and provide information, as prompted by the wizard. For details, see Assign API poller templates to nodes.

Periodically, SolarWinds updates API poller templates, as announced in SAM release notes. To determine the latest available version of a template, open the Assign API Pollers wizard.

Recreate any existing API pollers based on updated templates. Otherwise, polling stops and the following message may appear: "Bad request: Unexpected character following indexer."

Additional topics that may be useful include:

The following API poller templates are included in SAM:

More templates are available in the SAM Content Exchange on THWACK, as posted by solarwinds_worldwide_llc and tagged with an API Poller label. See this example. After you download a template from THWACK, import it into SAM on the Manage API Pollers page and then use the Assign API Pollers wizard to create an API poller for a node.