Best practices for application monitor polling in SAM

The Orion Platform is designed to optimize monitoring performance by automatically balancing polling intervals in heavy polling environments. If the polling rate reaches or exceeds 85% of the Orion server's maximum polling rate, the following message appears in the Orion Web Console and polling intervals are automatically adjusted to decrease the polling rate.

Poller Status Warning: A poller is either approaching or in excess of its polling rate limit.

To determine when to adjust polling rates and notify users, the Orion Platform products uses an internal calculation that includes both the number of network objects polled and the configured polling interval, along with the general assumption that 10,000 component monitors are running at default polling intervals.

With this data, the Orion Platform establishes two polling rate thresholds:

• A polling warning level, and
• A maximum polling limit level.

Due to how the Orion Platform calibrates polling on-the-fly, you don't need to compensate for performance issues by manually setting polling rates higher than required to ensure that data is polled frequently. The Orion Platform handles adjustments automatically to ensure that all polling jobs are completed. If the polling rate exceeds what the server can handle, the polling intervals are increased to handle the higher load.

Altering the polling rate or the number of components polled by a polling engine is the primary way to reduce the polling load on the server. Although the Orion Platform may compensate for a heavily populated installation by increasing the polling interval on the back end, SolarWinds recommends staying under the polling limit to avoid compounding issues with your installation.

Monitoring an excessive number of components on a single polling engine can negatively impact your SAM environment. Review the Scalability Engine Guidelines for SolarWinds products and stay within recommended limits. If using node-based licensing in SAM 6.9.1 or later, you can add an Additional Polling Engine at no extra licensing cost. See the SAM Licensing model for details.

General Orion Platform tips for polling engines include:

• Evaluate the status of polling engines in your environment and customize global polling rates, as necessary. See Review polling engine loads.
• Review current or potential issues in your deployment, as detected by Active Diagnostics. See Check deployment health regularly.

SAM-specific suggestions to improve polling rates include:

• Leverage WinRM application polling for WMI-based component monitors, as introduced in SAM 2020.2.

• WinRM fallback can negatively impact polling times. Make sure this feature is properly configured or disable it on specific nodes, as necessary. Otherwise, SAM will attempt to use WinRM during all future polling cycles and fallback will continue until the configuration is updated. See Configure WinRM polling in your SAM environment.

• For nodes for which monitoring is a lower priority, consider extending polling intervals for individual nodes or stopping polling entirely.
• Examine SAM templates and application monitors to determine if any component monitors can be disabled. See also Determine how many SAM component monitors are assigned per polling engine.
• Consider how often you need to poll hardware health statistics. The default polling rate is every 10 minutes but you may decide to extend intervals for some nodes. Asset Inventory polling occurs daily but can also be adjusted.

Review polling engine loads

Use the Polling Settings page to customize global polling rates, distribute Orion agents across polling engines, and more, as described in Optimize polling engines in your Orion Platform deployment. See also Manage Orion Polling Engines.

To check the status of multiple polling engines:

1. Click Settings > All Settings.
2. Scroll to the Details section at the bottom of the page, and then click Polling Settings.
3. Review details on the Polling Engines page to determine the source(s) of your excess polling load.
   
   
   

   Note the following details about this page:

   • The SAM Application Polling Rate pertains to polling jobs for SAM templates and application monitors. To calculate polling for AppInsight applications, SAM uses the actual number of component monitors that are actively polling, as opposed to the flat rate used to calculate license consumption for component-based licensing.
   • Many Orion Platform statistics use the term "elements," which typically refers to managed nodes, interfaces, or volumes. For SAM, polling statistics are usually expressed as "components," a reference to component monitors within SAM templates and application monitors that gather specific metrics for applications, processes, and so on. To learn more, see Work with SAM component monitors or watch SolarWinds Lab Bits: Common SAM Template Elements.

Check deployment health regularly

The Active Diagnostics tool runs daily to detect current or potential issues with the Orion server that usually serves as the Main Polling Engine, the database, and any Additional Polling Engines. After analysis, this tool provides summaries with links you can follow to resolve issues. To learn more, see Troubleshoot Orion Deployment issues with Active Diagnostics.

1. Click Settings > My Orion Deployment.
2. Click the Deployment Health tab.
   

   Review the circles at the top to see the total number of problems, potential issues, or healthy checks for all scalability engines in your environment.
   
   

   
3. In the main pane, review individual items. Sort the issues by priority in descending order to know which issues should be resolved first.
4. For more details about an issue, click the arrow at the end of the issue row. In the panel, review what went wrong and follow the article link for steps to resolve the issue.

You can also check logging levels for Orion agents. See How to gather NPM and SAM agent diagnostics.

Determine how many SAM component monitors are assigned per polling engine

To check the number of component monitors to each polling engine:

1. Click Settings > All Settings.
2. Scroll to the Details section at the bottom of the page, and then click Database Details.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the Database Details page, and then click Total elements per poller.
4. Review the information provided on the Total element count page.
   
   
   

   See also How to display all components polled for each polling engine in SAM.