WPM 2019.4 System Requirements

Release Date: November 5, 2019

Updated September 18, 2020

These recommended system requirements are for SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM) 2019.4 as a single product installed on Orion Platform 2019.4.

• Software requirements
• Account privileges
• Server port requirements
• Hardware requirements
• Orion database server requirements
• WPM Recorder requirements
• WPM Player requirements

Note the following details about system requirements:

• WPM requirements vary, depending on how many websites are being monitored and the number of transactions assigned to WPM Players. Some Single-Page Applications (SPAs) consume more system resources.
• WPM Recorders and a WPM Player are added to the Orion server during installation, but you can deploy them to remote systems situated near large groups of end users to get more accurate samplings of website performance, as described in the WPM Getting Started Guide. See also WPM Recorder requirements and WPM Player requirements.
• For cloud deployment recommendations, see the Orion Platform system requirements.
• To learn more about requirements, see the Multi-module system guidelines. You should also review your product administration guides and release notes, including:
  • WPM 2019.4 Release Notes
  • Orion Platform 2019.4 Release Notes

Software requirements for the Orion server

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

Software	Requirements
Operating system	Microsoft Windows 10 Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Note the following details: Desktop operating systems, such as Windows 10, 64-bit Pro or Enterprise are supported for evaluation environments only. For a smooth transition from your evaluation to production deployment, SolarWinds recommends installing evaluations on Windows Server machines. Do not install WPM on domain controllers, or on Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, or BlackBerry servers. End-of-support notice: Products that consume Orion Platform 2018.4 and later are no longer compatible with Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2. To use the new features introduced in Orion Platform 2018.4 or later, upgrade your environment at your earliest convenience.
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're not using Windows Authentication, make sure Anonymous Authentication is enabled for the SolarWinds NetPerfMon website. Anonymous Authentication is used with the default forms-based authentication. IIS is installed by the SolarWinds Orion Installer. You can install this software manually to reduce installation time or network bandwidth.
Microsoft .NET Framework	.NET 4.8 or later Run the same version of .NET on your primary Orion server and any Additional Polling Engines or Additional Web Servers in the environment. SolarWinds recommends installing .NET on your primary Orion server and all scalability engines before installing WPM. See this article for details.
Orion Web Console browser	Orion Platform products support the two most recent versions of the following browsers available at the release date. Firefox Chrome The following browsers are also supported: Microsoft Edge Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 11 or later with Active scripting If your organization requires an earlier IE version, use IE 11 Document Mode to emulate earlier versions.
Account privileges	SolarWinds recommends that Orion administrators have local administrator privileges on the Orion server to ensure full functionality of local Orion Platform tools. Orion user accounts limited to the Orion Web Console do not require local administrator privileges. To use domain accounts with WPM, each account should have local administrator privileges and be able to log into the Orion Web Console locally.

Server port requirements

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Port	Protocol	Service/Process	Direction	Description	Encryption
User-defined default: 22	SSH	SolarWinds Job Engine v2 IIS	Outbound from the Orion server to the device	Access Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) devices through the Command-Line Interface (CLI).	Device-based
25	TCP	SolarWinds Alerting Service V2	Outbound	SMTP port for non-encrypted messages	N/A
53	UDP	SolarWinds Job Engine V2	Bidirectional	Resolve DNS queries	N/A
80	TCP	IIS	Inbound	Default Additional Web Server port. If you specify any port other than 80, you must include that port in the URL used to access the Orion Web Console. For example, if you specify 192.168.0.3 and port 8080, the URL to access the Orion Web Console is http://192.168.0.3:8080 Open the port to enable communication from your computers to the Orion Web Console.	N/A
135	TCP	Microsoft EPMAP (DCE/RPC Locator service)	Bidirectional	WMI uses TCP Port 135 to initiate communication with the remotely managed host, then switches to any random high port anywhere between TCP ports 1024 — 65535. Click here for details.	N/A
161	UDP	SolarWinds Job Engine v2, SolarWinds Cortex (communication)	Bidirectional	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	Bidirectional	Receive trap messages	N/A
443	TCP	IIS	Inbound	Default port for HTTPS binding. Also used for bi-directional ESX/ESXi server polling.	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	Used for communication from the Orion server to the Orion database 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	Used for communication with the SQL Server Browser Service to determine how to handle certain non-standard SQL Server installations. Required only if your Orion database server is configured to use dynamic ports.	N/A
1801	TCP	MSMQ	Bidirectional	MSMQ WCF binding	WCF
5671	TCP	RabbitMQ	Bidirectional	For encrypted RabbitMQ messaging (AMQP/TLS) into the main polling engine from all scalability engines.	TLS 1.2
17777	TCP	SolarWinds Orion Module Engine SolarWinds Information Service SolarWinds Information Service V3 SolarWinds Cortex (communication)	Bidirectional	Communication between services and SolarWinds Orion module traffic. Communication between the Orion Web Console, the main polling engine, and all scalability engines. Communication between the main server and pool members.	RSA handshake, AES 256 communication using WCF TLS 1.2 with Cortex
17778	HTTPS	SolarWinds Agent	Bidirectional	Required for access to the SWIS API and agent communication	SSL
17781	TCP	WPM Playback Player	Bidirectional	The default port the WPM Player listens on. This port must be open between the Orion Server and the WPM Player for proper communications.	N/A
17782	TCP	WPM Playback Player	Inbound	Used for WPM Player-initiated communications mode. See Configure WPM Players.	N/A
17783	TCP	WPM Playback Player	Bidirectional	Used for automatic WPM Player updates.	N/A

See also:

• TCP ports
• TCP ports
• SolarWinds Port Requirements

Hardware requirements for the Orion server

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The following table lists minimum hardware requirements and recommendations for your Orion server on both physical and virtual computers. Use the minimum hardware configuration if you are evaluating the product or do not anticipate heavy usage.

Installing multiple Orion Platform products on the same computer may change the requirements.

Hardware requirements are listed by deployment size, based on SolarWinds NPM license levels. CPU recommendations for XL deployments use the PassMark Score. For details, see PassMark Performance Test (Copyright © 2019 PassMark® Software, obtained at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html on April 24, 2019).

Feature	Small SL100, SL250, SL500	Medium SL2000	Large SLX	XL
CPU	Quad core processor or better	Quad core processor or better	Quad core processor or better	CPUs with a total combined PassMark score of 7,000 or higher
	Do not enable Physical Address Extension (PAE).
Hard drive space	10 GB minimum 20 GB recommended	15 GB minimum 40 GB recommended	30 GB minimum 40 GB recommended	40 GB minimum 50 GB recommended Read/Write I/O performance of 800 IOPS
	SolarWinds recommends two 146 GB 15K (RAID 1/Mirrored Settings) hard drives with a dedicated drive for the server operating system and Orion Platform installation. Some common files may need to be installed on the same drive as the server OS. You may want to move or expand the Windows temporary directories.
Memory	6 GB minimum 8 GB recommended	8 GB minimum 16 GB recommended	16 GB minimum 32 GB recommended	16 GB minimum 32 GB recommended

Orion database server requirements

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The following table lists software and hardware requirements for your Orion database server using NPM license levels.

Feature	Small SL100, SL250, SL500	Medium SL2000	Large SLX	XL
Microsoft SQL Server	Express, Standard, or Enterprise versions of: SQL Server 2014 SQL Server 2014 SP1 SQL Server 2014 SP2 SQL Server 2016 SQL Server 2016 SP1 SQL Server 2016 SP2 SQL Server 2017 (including Linux installations) SolarWinds recommends using Express versions only for evaluations and very small environments.			Enterprise version of SQL Server: 2014 2014 SP1 2014 SP2 2016 2016 SP1 2016 SP2 2017 (including Linux installations)
	Recommendations Use the 64-bit version of Microsoft SQL Server. Use the Simple database recovery model to ensure best performance. Use the Full database recovery model if your Orion 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 the volume where you store transactions log has free space equal to or greater than the size of the Orion database. Transaction logs will continue to grow indefinitely until a database backup is performed and transactions are committed to the database. SolarWinds recommends daily database backups if using the Full database recovery model.
SQL Server collation	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 SolarWinds products support a case-insensitive (CI) database on a CS SQL Server. SolarWinds products do not support case-sensitive databases.
CPU	Quad core processor or better	Dual quad core processor or better	Dual quad core processor or better	CPUs with a total combined PassMark score of 32,000 or higher
Hard drive space	20 GB minimum 40 GB recommended	50 GB minimum 100 GB recommended	100 GB minimum 400 GB recommended*	500 GB minimum 1TB recommended Read/Write I/O performance of 30,000 IOPs 190,000 IOPS or better recommended 1 Gbit dedicated NIC
	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 OS. You may want to move or expand the Windows or SQL temporary directories. See Working with Temporary Directories.
Memory	8 GB minimum 16 GB recommended	16 GB minimum 64 GB recommended	64 GB minimum 128 GB recommended	256 GB minimum 512 GB recommended
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 installing Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio on your Orion database server. The Orion Installer adds the following x86 components if they are not found on your Orion database server: SQL Server System Common Language Runtime (CLR) Types. Orion Platform products use secure SQL CLR stored procedures for selected, non-business data operations to improve performance. Microsoft SQL Server Native Client Microsoft SQL Server Management Objects

* SolarWinds recommends the following hard drive configuration for large deployments:

• 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

WPM Recorder requirements

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In addition to the WPM Recorders added to the Orion server when you install WPM, you can deploy WPM Recorders to remote systems in different geographic regions, such as branch offices. See the WPM Getting Started Guide for details.

WPM 2019.4 supports two recorders: the new WPM Recorder introduced in WPM 3.0 and the Deprecated WPM Recorder from WPM 2.2.3.

The following requirements apply to remote systems that host the new WPM Recorder that is based on Google Chromium 69.0.3497.128:

Resource	Requirement
CPU	Single processor with 1 GHz or more
Memory	2 GB
Operating system	x64 systems only Windows 7, 8, 10 Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019 To support Image Match, keep the Scale and layout settings for Windows set to 100%.
TCP ports	80 (TCP) open for HTTP traffic 443 (TCP) open for HTTPS traffic 17777 (TCP) open for SolarWinds traffic

The following requirements apply to remote systems that host of the Deprecated WPM Recorder:

Resource	Requirement
CPU	Single processor with 1 GHz or more
Memory	2 GB
Operating system	x64 systems only Windows 7, 8, 10* Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2016*, and 2019* *WPM transactions that originate in the Deprecated WPM Recorder don't support SSL certificate authentication for some operating systems. Click here for details.
TCP ports	80 (TCP) open for HTTP traffic 443 (TCP) open for HTTPS traffic 17777 (TCP) open for SolarWinds traffic
Web browser	Internet Explorer 11 If your organization requires an earlier IE version, use IE 11 Document Mode to emulate earlier versions. See this article for details.

WPM Player requirements

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As described in How WPM works, the WPM Player is a Windows service you can deploy to remote systems to simulate end user experiences with web applications by playing back recorded transactions.

Note the following details:

• WPM Worker processes rely on SEUM-User accounts, created by the WPM Playback player service upon startup, for permissions. SolarWinds recommends adding SEUM-Users as members of the local Administrator group on the system hosting the WPM Player that will use them. Click here for more information.
  
• If a system hosts a hypervisor or Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) that runs other servers (such as print or file servers), consider hosting the WPM Player on different system instead.
• To learn about managing loads on remote systems that host WPM Players, see Scalability Engine Guidelines for SolarWinds Orion Products. You can also check the Player Load Percentage widget.
• The WPM Player service is based on Google Chrome 69.0.3497.128.
• If WPM doesn't detect the following prerequisites, you'll be prompted to verify the installation of:
  • Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2019 x86 Redistributable
  • Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2019 x64 Redistributable

Minimum requirements for systems hosting WPM Players

Resource	Requirement
CPU	Quad core processor or better
Memory	3 GB
.NET Framework	.NET 4.5
Operating system	Windows 7, 8, 10* Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2016*, and 2019* *Transactions that originate in the Deprecated WPM Recorder don't support SSL certificate authentication for some operating systems. Click here for details.
Account and security	Accounts can access the remote administrator share. Root certificates are updated.
TCP ports	80 (TCP), for outbound HTTP traffic 443 (TCP), for outbound HTTPS traffic 17777 (TCP), for outbound SolarWinds traffic 17781 (TCP), for bidirectional, server-initiated (passive) communication mode 17782 (TCP), for bidirectional, player-initiated (active) communication mode 17783 (TCP), for bidirectional, automatic WPM Player updates
Web browser	Internet Explorer 11 If your organization requires an earlier IE version, use IE 11 Document Mode to emulate earlier versions.