This article provides quick information about  your current environment and health check , Further it  will help you address the most common reasons of  performance issues on to your server without sending the diagnostics to SolarWinds support  .

In this article you can also Audit your own environment quickly if its been setup as recommended by the Solarwinds MINIMUM requirements or according to the settings eliminating bottlenecks creating performance issues within the set environment .

This article also help to save time to upload the diagnostics for Support where you have air gap between the server and you can check the basic health check on the actual server itself .

There are lots of other benefits to check the environment health within the internal due to security procedure not allowing uploading the diagnostics for Solarwinds support .

Your check list

✔Server Hardware

✔Total Elements (Nodes /Interfaces/ Volumes)  been polled per server

✔SQL Server / Orion DB Size / Settings / Options

✔Webpages Customization

Lets collect System diagnostics as below.

Navigate to Start -> SolarWinds Orion -> Documentation and Support

Launch the gray icon for Orion Diagnostics.> Click "Start"

This program will generate a .zip file as output.

( Unzip in a folder ) Right Click >  Select Extract Here .

Server Hardware

Lets check your System Hardware first if this even near to the Solarwinds MINIM recommended.

Go to the SystemInformation folder > Open the SystemInfo.txt file

You will be able to find the System hardware specification  below is an example where system is only assigned with 2 Physical CPU Sockets /

below is an example where the system is only assigned two CPU PHYSICAL SOCKETS which is below Solarwinds MINIMUM recommendation .

You must have to have MINIMUM 4 PHYSICAL CPU SOCKETS here .

System Type:               x64-based PC

✘Processor(s):              2 Processor(s) Installed.

                           [01]: Intel64 Family 6 Model 45 Stepping 7 GenuineIntel ~1600 Mhz

                           [02]: Intel64 Family 6 Model 45 Stepping 7 GenuineIntel ~1400 Mhz

                          Total Physical Memory:     49.082 MB

                          Available Physical Memory: 39.408 MB

                          Virtual Memory: Max Size:  56.250 MB

                          Virtual Memory: Available: 45.376 MB

                          Virtual Memory: In Use:    10.874 MB

Now open the SysInfo.csv file and check the further current CPU load on the System and CPU GHz level .

Below in an example where the CPU load in around 70% on the current system due to two main reasons .

Low Physical Sockets assigned

Low CPU power less then 3.0 GHz

You should be able to see MINIMUM 4 Physical Processors  Sockets as below .

System Model:              VMware Virtual Platform

System Type:               x64-based PC

✔Processor(s):              4 Processor(s) Installed.

                           [01]: Intel64 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 1 GenuineIntel ~3493 Mhz

                           [02]: Intel64 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 1 GenuineIntel ~3493 Mhz

                           [03]: Intel64 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 1 GenuineIntel ~3493 Mhz

                           [04]: Intel64 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 1 GenuineIntel ~3493 Mhz

BIOS Version:              Phoenix Technologies LTD 6.00, 4/14/2014

Further check how much memory is assinged and available for the system and check the TaskManager which application is consuming high memory .

In above case the System Hardware is not even near to the recommended SolarWinds production deployment therefor the CPU load will remain high therefor System resources.

The following table lists minimum hardware requirements and recommendations for your SolarWinds Orion server.

Installing multiple SolarWindsOrion Platform products on the same computer may change the requirements.

Hardware requirements are listed by SolarWinds NPM license level.

These minimum requirements are for the Orion Platform. Products that run on the Orion Platform may have different requirements, such as different OS or memory requirements.

Consult your product-specific documentation for the exact requirements.

For more details see below guide

SolarWinds Orion server hardware requirements

Total Elements (Nodes /Interfaces/ Volumes)  been polled per server

Go to folder "DB" > Open file "AllEngines.csv"

Check how many Elements you are polling per server

With only SolarWinds SLX license you can montior up to 12000 Elements and beyond this you will need an Additional Polling Engine to monitor.

I would also strongly advise you to check the belp post for any other questions if you are polling beyond 12000 Elements with single SLX Server.

Boost your server polling capacity with Stackable Poller license

Orion DB Size and settings

Go to the DBInfo Folder > Open DatabaseInfo.csv file

Check the Database Recovery Mode

Check the Total Database Size

Default DB Recovery should be SIMPLE (Strongly recommended)

• I have a very large Orion database. What should I check?
• I have database performance issues. How can i improve my database performance?
• Why is my Orion database growing so quickly?
• Why does my Orion performance decrease each day?
• Why is my Orion Web Console loading data at a slow rate?

For more details please see the post below and follow all the steps one by one to check your Orion Database Health and settings.

This guide will help you address the most common questions and issues related to the Orion database performance check and configuration without using the SolarWinds Database Administrator (DBA).

Quick Orion database health check guide

Quick Orion database health check guide - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

Web pages recommended settings

Tips for better Orion Web Console performance - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

Still have any question / need assistance ?

Please feel free to submit a new support ticket in relation to your question/error. Our support lines are available 24/7.

http://www.solarwinds.com/support/ticket

You can also contact the support by 24/7  phone support .

http://www.solarwinds.com/company/contact.aspx

I accidentally created a rule that send an up/down message on every hardware sensor we are monitoring.

Now I'm standing here with egg on my face and 5k+ emails coming in to the team.

I stopped the service, fixed my rule, but the emails are still coming when I start the services.

I googled and searched, but not having any luck finding the queue.

Orion Platform 2016.2.100, NCM 7.5.1, NPM 12.0.1, DPA 10.2.0, QoE 2.2.0, IVIM 2.1.2, SAM 6.3.0, NetPath 1.0.1

windows server 2012 R2

https://support.solarwinds.com/Success_Center/Network_Performance_Monitor_(NPM)/Clear_queued_trap_or_syslog_messages

Says to navigate to the msmq - but i don't see it under computer management/Services and applications.

The service is installed.

now i'm not only embarrassed, I'm also stumped.

Anyone around that can help me figure out how to purge the queue?

We recently upgraded to NPM 12.01 and have found that all the email alerts that used to contain embedded content (high receive/transmit for example, top talkers, netflow details) now provide those details in a PDF attachment.  I opened a case with the support team and was told the behavior in  version 12 changed and embedded content is now longer supported.  

The embedded content format was much more user friendly and it would be great to have it back.

Has anyone else seen or been told this?

Thanks al!

What would cause node names to randomly change from a friendly (and sometimes manually set) name to the polling IP?  Happens across 3 separate NPM environments.  Persists through multiple versions of the product.  Only happens to Windows nodes.

We would like to improve user experience and for such reason I'd like to better understand if our users prefers INITIALLY to add nodes manually or run product network discovery in order to import devices to NPM

Hi I'm new to thwack, npm and solarwinds products in general.

We've got basic monitoring setup for the devices and ports we want to monitor for uptime, utilization, etc, but I have several devices which have higher than average response times and am getting tired of the email alerts I keep getting that they are "exceptionally high" when they are historically normal for the devices.

One is a small remote Juniper SSG 5 netscreen firewall which is behind a T1 circuit that has been just shy of flakey from day one. It constantly has response times from ~250ms to ~1275ms and we've never been able to nail down where the problem is so we've just lived with it for 15 years.

Another is on site where NPM is running with our monitor/threat prevention appliance which is watching all traffic for all vlans and running threat assessment against everything. Its external switches interfaces shows response times are usually from ~500-1750ms. Not what we'd like to see but the vendor tells us it has no impact on actual performance of the unit. We're more interested on getting notifications of failures rather than response times because it is configured for fail-open so if it fails it's not the end of our world but we do need to see a notification.

I've selected the 'Override Orion General Thresholds' and set the Warning & Critical values to what I want, but it continues to blast me with emails for these nodes. Is there somewhere I have to check to even allow overrides or something?

Thanks

We recently upgraded from NPM v12 to v12.01 (withe the Orion Platform 2016.2-Hot Fix 1).  Since the upgrade, we are frequently dealing w/problems discovering as well as re-discovering devices.

For example,

Sometimes, the Network Sonar Discovery (aka NSD) aborts w/an error stating that there was a problem during discovery.  Other times, the NSD finishes but w/the error "Exception occurred during discovery import."

Also, when I do a List Resources on my devices, sometimes it just runs for non stop until I press the Cancel button.  The only workaround then is to use the Change Polling Engine option and then it works. 

I already ran a repair on the Core Services installer for my core and polling engines.  Yet, discovery problems persists.   I consulted w/SW tech support but so far, none of their suggestions have worked. 

If any of your have run into similar issues, I would very much like to hear from you and know what worked for you. 

Thanks. 

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Since this got a couple of hundred views and several comments, I wanted to let you know of something else I have found.  We were having several weird issues with the web console MIB Browser and the UnDP app on our Orion server.  I checked the newest MIBs.cfg file in my Customer Portal and noticed that it is only 1.4GB in size after unzipping it.  I can only guess that the 1.8GB one that was released in late October or early November that I reference in my original post above was some kind of mistake, as it was quite odd for it to go from 1.3GB in size to 1.8GB in size in such a short time.  The current 1.4GB size seems more reasonable as usually only a couple dozen Megabytes are added to the file on average each week.

I highlyrecommend replacing your MIBs.cfg file, whether you still have the original 1.3GB size one from when you updated to NPM 12.0.1, or the 1.8GB oversized one I recommended you update to in early November, ASAP.

We have 3 Orion environments, 2 of which are in our Production environment and running on Win 2008 R2 servers and 1 is a Dev box for testing and general tomfoolery that is running on a Win 2012 box. All three had a Mibs.cfg file size of 1.3 GB.  In case you don't know, this file is the SNMP OID Database SolarWinds uses for the Universal Device Poller application and the Manage Pollers page for polling CPU, Memory, Node Details, and custom SNMP polling.  So when you are using their MIB Browser feature you are actually browsing this file.

Per the documentation it says that the latest MIBs.cfg file at the time of release should contained in each product upgrade.  So typically just upgrading Orion should automatically update the Orion MIB database.  Since NPM 12.0.1 was packaged and released on September 28, 2016, our MIBs.cfg file should have been current up to that time.  Now, I'm not sure how much has been added to the Orion MIB database between Sep 28th and now, but the newest version of the MIBs.cfg file is nearly 1.9 GB in size once unzipped...  That's almost a 50% increase in size (probably closer to 40%, but still) in just over a month's time...  My guess is they didn't package up the newest MIBs.cfg file in the NPM 12 release.  I would almost guess that they may have even put a substantially older MIBs.cfg file in there because an extra 600 MB worth of MIBs is a lot.  That file has been around for years and years, so even if it gained 600 MB in 6 months I would be surprised.

In case you don't know this as well, SolarWinds updates the MIBs.cfg database file every two weeks based on customer support tickets, so instead of waiting for a product upgrade you can keep your MIB database up to date yourself.  Usually this isn't necessary unless you have a node you're trying to apply custom SNMP monitoring to and Orion doesn't know about the OID's you are trying to poll.  The file can be downloaded from your Customer Portal under "Helpful Links".  You then simply unzip the downloaded file and replace the old file, located at "C:\ProgramData\Solarwinds\MIBs.cfg", with the new one.  I recommend renaming the old one first to make a backup of it (I simply change its name to "MIBs.cfg.OLD_todaysDateHere") just in case.  Then you restart all Orion Services and you should be good to go.  If you have more than one polling engine then you will need to do this on your Primary Polling Engine and all Additional Polling Engines (I'm not sure about your Additional Web Server if you have one of those, but my guess is if that file is found in that spot then you should probably replace it).

CONCLUSION: The moral of this post is that you should check your MIBs.cfg file and see if it is anywhere close to the size of the new one (1,896 MB to be exact).  I also recommend going into the MIB browser on your web console or into the UnDP application on your server and browsing the MIB library there to see if it works.  I was getting an error in UnDP and just a blank page in the web's MIB Browser until I replaced the file and restarted the services.  And yes, I did try restarting the services first before replacing the file and that didn't help.  Only once I replaced the file and restarted the services did it help.

Also, please reply if you too notice this.  I'd be curious to know how prevalent this issue is or isn't.

Before I open a feature request, I wanted to make sure I'm not missing something. How can you restrict which users are allowed to create new netpaths and which ones cannot. Best I can tell it is based off of Node Management rights. However, not all of my users who manage nodes I want making netpaths.

~E

Greetings thwackers!

I have an issue that has come up often, but I usually just fix it and move on.  Thought maybe I should get some input this time...

Two Hyper-V hosts just had interfaces go unknown, and the status of associated elements are not matching up.  For instance, the Disk Volumes all show green in the pop-up hover display, but they aren't actually collecting data.  Same for RAM and CPU.  Further, the Hyper-V Host Details shows:

Management	Edit Host
Host Status	Could Not Poll
Host Status Details	Provider load failure Scope: <IP ADDRESS>\root\CIMV2[<USERNAME>] ErrorCode: 0x80041013
Host Polling Status	Hyper-V Polling OK
Product Name	Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Datacenter

On the box itself, I'm seeing successful logins, but then queries fail out.

My question here is this:  shouldn't "Could Not Poll" and "Hyper-V Polling OK" be mutually exclusive?  Or are these not actually related?

Thanks in advance!

We are upgrading our NPM platform environment to new HP DL380 Gen9 E5-264 with 128 mem gig - Win server 2012 , Win SOL 2012

We want to do Fresh install and upgrade all of our Modules to run on the newest NPM v12 , Config Manager, ipam, sam, vnqm, udt, srm and so on.

What can I do copy over the customization I have done over the years to prevent from starting over from scratch.

Mike

)    

Hi,

What software do I need to install to monitor hardware health for Lenovo x3650M5 ?

So I have a filesystem that the OS reports at 100% but solarwinds shows the usage as 76%

$ df

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda2             10079084   4739152   4827932  50% /

tmpfs                 24689212         0  24689212   0% /dev/shm

/dev/sda1               198337     32001    156096  18% /boot

/dev/sda4            273521664 273521644        20 100% /dotomi

Why is this? how can i get solarwinds to reflect this correctly?

I have a SNMP TRAPS requirement from Database team. I have tried several solutions posted on Thwack but none of them has the same requirement.

Facts

Source Server: Same for All traps

Traps: Different

Trigger:

Reset: No Reset Condition (Prefer: No reset condition – Trigger this alert each time the trigger condition is met)

Platform: Orion Platform 2016.1.5300, SAM 6.2.4, DPA 10.0.1, NCM 7.5, IVIM 2.1.2, QoE 2.1.0, NetPath 1.0, NPM 12.0, NTA 4.2.0, UDT 3.2.4

Requirement:

Trigger Condition: Every time the trap comes in Alarm should be triggered.

Reset : No reset condition should be there. Engineer will manually reset the Alert after the NOC notifies them.

My Goal:

Create New Alert based on Varbinds and Alert should trigger every time a trap comes in.

Message # 1

ibmSoNASNotificationMessage =

Message # 2

tsveERRI =

Current Setup:

Trap Collector/Forwarder : sc0240v

Color is different just because I just created basic alerts for the following

and

We can disregard the above and create a new condition from scratch.

I hope someone can help me with this request.

Hi all. I've looked at different threads regarding emails failing out of NPM in general, but the traditional fixes aren't working for me. I've verified the SMTP server, I've sent test emails, and I get emails fine from NCM (which I installed the same day I upgraded NPM) - and the alerts appear to be firing fine on the alerts page/events page, but we've traditionally gotten emails for these events. I'm just not sure where to look to specifically troubleshoot emails with one portion of NPM and not Orion in general. All of the alerts that were there before are still turned on, but anything that shows up specifically on the "events" page is not generating an email like it was before. I've looked multiple times and cannot figure out where this is breaking. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Overview

This article provides information about FAQs asked by the customer based on the environments combined.

Environment

Orion Platform versions above NPM 10.6

Strongly recommended to have latest version of Orion

Detail

All of us know SolarWinds SLX license you can monitor up to 12000 Elements and beyond this you will need an Additional Polling Engine to monitor.

Use additional polling engines for 12000 or more monitored elements

if you plan to monitor 12000 or more elements, Solarwidns recommends that you install additional polling engine on separate server to help distribute the work load.

What is Stackable Additional Polling Engine idea is ?

Its another engine on the existing system hardware you have , using full  capacity of your current hardware . This engine will be stacked with your existing engine seamlessly running on the same hardware boosting the existing polling capacity of current host without any additional cost to maintain another system host.

Idea is exactly adding another stackable switch within existing chassis to add more capacity . So if your existing chassis can take it you can add more stack into .

With the latest version of SolarWinds NPM, you can now install up to three unique polling engines on a single polling server, sharing a single IP address. Stackable polling engines enable you to effectively triple the polling capacity of a single server so you can get benefit of available server hardware within the existing installed environment

Further it will help you to monitor more Elements ( Nodes/Volumes/Interfaces/Services ) without having any dedicated servers to be confirmed and manage so its less overhead for the I.T staff to manage .

Benefits :

No overhead to manage or arrange another system hardware just using existing Server hardware capacity (Very cost effective )

No management approval process waiting time for system deployment

No infrastructure change required

No troubleshooting and I.T management resources to dedicate  for another hardware

No extra IP address needed to be allowed for the devices for the polling / Downloading the configuration with NCM - Less overhead

No downtime required during installation

No configuration wizard need to run

No services need to restart during this process on production environment

No FOE licenses per server to cover more elements for HA (Very cost effective )

Freedom to extend any Poller (Primary Polling Engine OR Existing Additional Polling Engine ) (Very cost effective )
Finally within few minutes you will be ready to  polling more elements within the existing infrastructure without making a single change and  wasting the time / resources /  money.

How can i check my Server current hardware meeting this requirments

For more informaiton MINIMUM Hardware Requirments see below.

SolarWinds Orion server hardware requirements

How many Stackable Poller license I can have on the Single Server?

Up to three total polling engines may be installed on a single server (i.e. one primary NPM
polling engine with one or two additional polling engines on Primary Server  or three additional polling engines on
the Additional polling server ).

Note: A stack requires only 1 IP address, regardless of the number of APEs

Can I install Stackable Poller on my existing Additional Polling Engine?

Yes 'Stackable Poller' extending capability on the Poller  you can have multiple Stackable poller up to 3  on your existing Additional Poller It can be update by Smart Bundler 

How can I update my  Poller for Stackable Poller?

On the  Poller it can be updated by Smart Bundler.

It means that by additional poller package downloadable from customer portal (not the Individual Downloads, but the Main Additional Poller Installer also called Smart Bundler).

How to install Stackable Poller on my Primary Polling Engine?

In this example I am assuming we are implementing Stackable Poller on the Main Poller (that has enough resources to tackle additional load)
As you are aware a single poller can tackle upto 12k elements
Also there is no special installer for Stackable Poller
You will need a license to be purchased as for Additional Polling Engine
You will go into your Customer Portal & download the Additional Poller Smart Bundler  (not the Individual Downloads, but the Main Additional Poller Installer also called Smart Bundler)
Basically when you will run Additional Poller Smart Bundler this installer will say on the main poller that everything is already installed and ask you if you want extend license.
Now simply key in the license of the Additional Poller in the wizard
It will never install anything on main poller it only just update the license and will deploy the stack Engine seamlessly
So the customer has got extra capability to fully utilize his server hardware
Also after the license has been applied you can open the License Manager and you will see another entry in the Lincense Manager as following

On Primary Polling Engine it will take up to 2 MAX Additional Polling Engine license keys

On Additional Polling Engine it will looks like this

You will have the message "The machine has reached to license limit" after that therefor it will only be able to take up to 3 licenses.

So if I have have mutiple modules installed on the Primary Poller (do I have to install all the other modules as well , because Smart bundler will download say APE SAM , APE UDT , APE NPM)
When I will run the Smart Bundler on the Primary poller (it will not say that Primary Poller is already installed on this machine)

Yes, it will say on main that everything is installed and ask you if you want extend license so it will never install anything on main (as the required services are already installed and doesn't required any extra service to be installed  ) , Just update license and deploy the stack Engine seamlessly the main propose and stack functionality .So it does make necessary changes required without installing any service or software that's how its by design to work .

If I will install Stackable Poller on my primary server it will increase the capacity to 24K elements to tackle?

It will ask you on main to add license key for additional poller (means 24k elements). Once you run it again, you can add another AP license (means 36k elements) and if you run it third time,

it will say  This machine has reached its license limit .  The same functionality is for Additional Poller installation  and yes, Stackable poller

For more details, please see the post below:

http://thwack.solarwinds.com/community/solarwinds-community/geek-speak_tht/blog/2013/06/19/not-so-stupid-poller-tricks

http://www.solarwinds.com/documentat...Guidelines.pdf

Hi all, I am a new user to Solarwinds - I have a 2008 VM server with Solarwinds NPM12 installed, tied into GNS3 with 8 routers 4 switches and a few servers. All working fine.

Solarwinds is indeed a powerful tool very impressed so far - planning on using this lab setup to go through the SCP asap.

However I have been given 3X Dell PowerEdge servers to be used for Solarwinds & Tasked with moving an existing VM solarwinds to the 3 previously mentioned PowerEdge servers.

These servers I'm lead to believe have bear bones server 2012 in preparation for SW.

Any suggestion on where to start? What would each server be used for? Application/DB and backup?

Is there a guide somewhere for utilising all 3 servers for this and what needs to be installed on what?

Sorry if this is a bit vague, talk about baptism by fire!

When I try to monitor outlook.office.com:443 in netpath, it shows ~50% packet loss to all nodes. Use of the service shows that this is clearly not actually happening for user traffic. What's up with this?

Hi all,

I created UNDP for WLC with SNMP OID 1.3.6.1.4.1.14179.2.1.4.1.7, the result are actually table of SSID which user connected to e.g.:

FINANCE

FINANCE

GUEST

FINANCE
GUEST

is there anyway to parse the result to become like this:

SSID FINANCE --> result = 3

SSID GUEST --> result = 2

This idea is came from this link

https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/11976136/track-number-users-ssid-using-snmp-wlc-2504

So we can create chart to track the number of client on particular SSID.

thank you.

Adi