Documentation forServer & Application Monitor
Monitoring your applications and environment is a key capability of SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly Hybrid Cloud Observability) and is available in the Essentials edition. Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is also available in a standalone module.

Application Dependencies requirements in SAM

Before enabling the Application Dependencies feature to track how applications, application processes, and servers connect to each another in your environment, review the following requirements and recommendations.

Requirements
Permissions

To configure Application Dependencies settings, use an SolarWinds Platform Administrator account with the following Node Management rights:

  • Execute Application Dependency polling
  • Deploy agents to nodes

After upgrading, ADM is automatically disabled for Orion Server nodes. You can manually enable it, if needed.

If the PollingEnabledOnOrionServers option in centralized settings is disabled, polling on Orion server nodes will be disabled.

The option for enabling ADM on the node edit page is disabled by default for Orion server nodes, enabling the PollingEnabledOnOrionServers option in centralized settings returns access to it.
Host systems

Each dependency must involve two separate physical or virtual servers, represented as nodes in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

Each node must be monitored by at least one assigned application monitor.

Do not enable this feature on the SolarWinds Platform server or a scalability engine such as an Additional Polling Engine.

Linux distributions must support GNU C Library (glibc) 2.18 or later.

The following environments are not supported:

  • Windows 2008 R2 and R2 SP1 with driver installation protection enabled
  • Desktop OS such as Windows 10
  • Raspbian 8.0

Do not use IPv6 or link-local addresses to communicate within the network segment (link) or the broadcast domain to which the host is connected.
SolarWinds Platform agent

SAM deploys agents to flag nodes for polling so host systems must support SolarWinds Platform agent requirements.

Enable "Allow automatic agent updates" on the Manage Agents > Edit Agent Settings page so you don't have to update agents manually.
Ports

Remote systems that host applications and listen on a specific port must support the following exceptions.

  • On the destination node, allow:
    • Inbound TCP connections for the port, and
    • An inbound rule from any random remote port.
  • On the source node, allow an outbound TCP connection for the port from an Nping application on any random port.

Using this feature with Windows Failover Clusters (WFCs) has additional requirements.

Recommended monitoring limits

For optimal performance, use the Application Dependencies feature to monitor up to 500 nodes. For example, in a typical deployment where 500 nodes are monitored, and another 500 nodes are not monitored by this feature, you can track dependencies for:

  • Up to 7500 application-to-application connections, and
  • Up to 1500 node-to-node connections.

Note the following details about these guidelines:

  • Recommended limits are not cumulative. The number of application-to-application dependencies does not impact the number of node-to-node dependencies.
  • These limits assume an average of 3 IP addresses (IPv6 or IPv4) and 5 applications per node.
  • SolarWinds Platform agents hosted on minimally provisioned servers can consume high CPU usage during polling. If that occurs, reduce the quantity of monitored component monitors or increase server resources. For more tips, see SAM polling recommendations.