Documentation forSolarWinds Platform Self-Hosted

Calculate node availability in the SolarWinds Platform

This topic applies to all SolarWinds Platform products.

Determine the availability under SolarWinds Platform Polling Settings > Calculations & Thresholds > Availability Calculation by using one of the following methods.

To disregard node availability during maintenance, suspend collecting data or triggering alerts for the node.

Node Status

The default method is based on the historical Up or Down status of the selected node. The selected node is polled for status on the Default Node Poll Interval defined on the SolarWinds Platform Polling Settings view.

  • If a node responds to a ping in the default interval, it is considered Up. A value of 100 is recorded in the Response Time view.

  • If a node does not respond to a ping in the default interval, it is considered Down. A value of 0 is recorded in the Response Time view.

A Critical node status does not affect node availability. A node can enter a Critical status as a result of sustained polling errors while still responding to ICMP. This does not count as Down for availability calculations. If ICMP responds, the availability sample is recorded as Up.

To calculate node availability over a selected time period, the sum of all Response Time table records for the selected node over the selected time period is divided by the selected time period. This provides an average availability over the selected time period.

Percent Packet Loss

This method is a more complicated calculation that bases the availability of a selected node on its packet loss percentage. The selected node is polled for status. If it responds within the Default Node Poll Interval defined on the SolarWinds Platform Polling Settings view, a value of 100 is averaged with the previous 10 availability records.

The result of the Percent Packet Loss calculation is a sliding-window average. To calculate node availability over a selected time period, the sum of all results in the Response Time table for the selected node over the selected time period is divided by the selected time period. This provides an average availability over time.

The Percent Packet Loss method introduces a historical dependency into each availability node record. It is best practice to leave calculations based on Node Status unless you specifically need node availability based on packet loss.