Determine if an Additional Polling Engine is needed

Your SAM installation consists of an SolarWinds Platform server that hosts the SolarWinds Platform Web Console and serves as the main polling engine, and the SolarWinds Platform Database Server. Polling engines gather device statistics and store the information on the SolarWinds Platform Database Server. The main polling engine reads the stored information from the SolarWinds Platform Database Server.

Your main polling engine polls a definite number of elements depending on the SolarWinds Platform product. Too many elements on a single polling engine can have a negative impact on your SolarWinds SAM deployment. When the maximum polling throughput on a single polling engine is reached, the polling intervals are automatically increased to handle the higher load. To keep default polling intervals, you need to add polling capacity.

If you encounter the following issues or performance, you may need to add one or more Additional Polling Engines:

• Polling completion rates are lower than expected which leads to gaps in data.
• Sporadic component monitor timeouts usually resulting in component monitors showing an "Unknown" status, reporting the error, "Connection timeout. Job canceled by scheduler."
• Resource exhaustion on the SQL server.

Installing Additional Polling Engine and Additional Web Servers (collectively known as "scalability engines") help you extend your SolarWinds SAM implementation. You can install Additional Polling Engines to aid you in load balancing and configure Additional Web Servers to ensure redundant access through more than one web server. By sharing the same database, you can also share a unified user interface, making the addition of polling engines transparent to your staff.

To learn more about scaling out your SAM environment, see Scalability Engine Guidelines for SolarWinds products.

To learn how scalability engines are licensed, see the SAM licensing model.

To purchase licenses, contact your SolarWinds Sales.