Product terminology

SolarWinds Platform: The common back-end platform used by the SolarWinds SolarWinds Platform suite of products, including NPM, SAM, NCM, NTA, LA, and more. The platform provides the backbone for navigation, settings, and common features like alerts and reports.

SolarWinds Platform Web Console: The web interface you see when you log in that is used to view, configure, and manage all your monitored objects. It also provides a consistent look-and-feel across products, giving you a “single pane of glass” for your SolarWinds Platform monitoring tools.

SolarWinds Platform Application Server: A Windows server that runs the SolarWinds Platform Web Console and collects data from monitored objects. Also called the SolarWinds Platform Main Poller.

SolarWinds Platform Database Server: A Windows SQL server that should be hosted on a dedicated server in a production environment, separately from the SolarWinds Platform Application Server. It stores SolarWinds Platform configuration data and all collected performance and syslog data.

Polling Engine: A Polling Engine controls polling job scheduling, data processing, and queries your monitored devices for performance metrics like CPU, memory, and up/down status. Additional Polling Engines can be licensed to provide additional scalability and capacity. By default, the SolarWinds Platform Server provides one Polling Engine (often referred to as the Main Polling Engine).