Documentation forSolarWinds Platform Self-Hosted

Manage container services

This topic applies only to the following products:

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted

SAM — VMAN

With the necessary Orion Administrator privileges and a SolarWinds Token, you can add container services to nodes on the Container Services page. This section describes various elements that are deployed to Linux nodes by the Manage Container Services wizard when you add a container service, such as Orion Monitor containers and Orion Aggregator containers.

To access the Container Services page:

  1. Clicking Settings > All Settings.

  2. Under Node & Group Management, click Manage Container Services.

Click Add to open the Manage Container Service wizard to specify service details, such as name, environment type, and host node. Follow the online instructions to add a container service, which involves running specific commands in Linux environments. You can also use this wizard to edit an existing service.

Here is an example of the Manage Container Service wizard:

As you progress through the wizard and run Linux commands, several containers are deployed:

  • An Orion Monitor container is added to each node in a cluster to track node status and metrics. This container is based on the weaveworks\scope image for the container service and that runs in a --probe only mode

    Each managed Orion node that hosts at least one container consumes a license. To monitor all containers in a single cluster, add each server from the cluster as a managed node.

  • An Orion Aggregator container is added to the orchestrator's master node to collect data from Orion Monitor containers in clusters. Each Orion Aggregator container acts as an SolarWinds Platform Agent, reporting status and metrics to the SolarWinds Platform server every five minutes.

    In YAML files, Orion Aggregator containers are referenced as "Scope2Orion".

The SolarWinds Platform checks status of Orion Aggregator containers every minute.

  • If an Orion Aggregator container fails to connect to the SolarWinds Platform server for two, consecutive five-minute intervals, the container service status changes to Down and the container status switches to Unknown.
  • If an Orion Aggregator container fails to report metrics from Orion Monitor containers for two, consecutive five-minute intervals, the container status switches to Unknown.

Starting in Orion Platform 2020.2.6, communication between Orion Monitor containers and the Orion Aggregator container is handled via HTTPS, not HTTP.

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