Documentation forSolarWinds Platform Self-Hosted

Poll devices with SolarWinds Platform Agents

This topic applies only to the following SolarWinds Platform products:

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted

DPAIM — LA — NAM — NPM — SAM — SCM — SRM — VMAN*

An agent is software that provides a communication channel between the SolarWinds Platform server and a Windows or Linux/Unix computer. Products install plugins on agents to collect the data that the agents send back. This can be beneficial in situations such as:

  • Polling hosts and applications behind firewall NAT or proxies.
  • Polling nodes and applications across multiple discrete networks that have overlapping IP address space.
  • Secure, encrypted polling over a single port.
  • Support for low bandwidth, high latency connections.
  • Polling nodes across domains where no domain trusts have been established.
  • Full, end-to-end encryption between the monitored host and the main polling engine.

You can monitor servers hosted by cloud-based services such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and other Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

After deployment, all communication between the SolarWinds Platform server and the agent occur over a fixed port. This communication is fully encrypted using 3072-bit TLS encryption. The agent protocol supports NAT traversal and passing through proxy servers that require authentication.