SolarWinds IT monitoring and management products scale to the largest and most highly distributed global enterprises without compromising the affordability, ease-of-use, and power that have made them so popular with IT professionals. In this presentation Francois Caron, Product Management Director, SolarWinds shares the architecture options that are available for scaling your monitoring and management capabilities to a hundred thousand or more network devices, servers, and applications no matter where they are on the globe. He also discusses the current state of integration between SolarWinds products with a focus on the integrations that SolarWinds federal customers are most interested in. Learn More and Connect with SolarWinds Federal: Federal website: http://www.solarwinds.com/federal thwack Federal and Government group: http://thwack.solarwinds.com/groups/federal-and-government Twitter: http://twitter.com/SolarWinds_Gov

1. SolarWinds®Enterprise Scalability and
Product Integrations
Francois Caron
Product Management Director - Network Management and Online Demo
SolarWinds
© 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

2. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Large Scale Networks
» Scalability and deployment are influenced by:
 Network size
 Network topology (e.g. monitoring across WAN/low
bandwidth)
 Sampling frequency (1h to 1min or less)
 Diversity of managed objects (Products installed, Customer
pollers – UnDP)
» Designed to scale from 100’s of nodes to tens
of thousands
 Based on the use of Additional Polling Engines
NPM
Interfaces, Wireless,
Virtualization, UCS,…
Core (main polling engine)
Common services: Nodes, Volumes, Events, Reports, Discovery, Syslogs & Traps
Core DB
Additional
Polling Engine
Network, Servers
& Applications
IPAM
IP add.
Mgmt.
NTA
IP Flows
Main WEB Server
More
Network, Servers
& Applications
SAM
Servers and
Applications
UDT,
VNQM,
WPM,
NCM,
…
More
Network, Servers
& Applications
Additional
Polling Engine

3. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Distributed Environments
» Additional Polling Engine more tolerant to
remote deployments since v10.2
 Orion® Core, NPM, SAM
 NTA, NCM, VNQM, UDT to follow
3
NPM
Interfaces, Wireless,
Virtualization, UCS,…
Core (main polling engine)
Common services: Nodes, Volumes, Events, Reports, Discovery, Syslogs & Traps
Core DB
Additional
Polling Engine
Local Network, Servers
& Applications
IPAM
IP add.
Mgmt.
NTA
IP Flows
Main WEB Server
Remote
Network, Servers
& Applications
SAM
Servers and
Applications
UDT,
VNQM,
WPM,
NCM,
…
Remote
Network, Servers
& Applications
Additional
Polling Engine
WAN

4. Multi-level Management
» Orion instances in regions, Enterprise
Operations Console (EOC) - at the top
level for roll-ups
» Up to 600K elements
» EOC consolidates real-time statuses at
the top level (no centralization of
platform admin):
 Alerts, Events, Syslog, Traps (last 24 hours
worth of data)
 Core Node, Volume, Interface and Wireless
data
» Limited historical data
4
Enterprise Operations Console (EOC)
© 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
NPM
Interfaces, Wireless,
Virtualization, UCS,…
Core (main polling engine)
Core DB
IPAM
IP add.
Mgmt.
NTA
IP Flows
Main WEB Server
SAM
Servers and
Applications
UDT,
VNQM,
WPM,
NCM,
…
NPM
Interfaces, Wireless,
Virtualization, UCS,…
Core (main polling engine)
Core DB
IPAM
IP add.
Mgmt.
NTA
IP Flows
Main WEB Server
SAM
Servers and
Applications
UDT,
VNQM,
WPM,
NCM,
…

5. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Automation and API
» Automation is key to scalability because it keeps your admin costs under control as you grow
» Orion API
 Access to SWIS: the data access layer used by Orion-based products
 Great SDK, API and SWIS video here
 Can (not an exhaustive list- see documentation for full list)
• Add a node, trigger discovery, create and populate custom properties
• Un-manage and re-manage nodes, interfaces, applications
 Cannot (known feature requests)
• Trigger a custom poller (UnDP poller)
• Read all discovered interfaces and selectively import them (e.g. remove Loopbacks)
» Resources
 NPM, NCM: How to automate the creation of Orion Platform (aka Core) nodes from the API
 SAM: How can I deploy Application monitors using PowerShell® and the Orion SDK?
 The SDK “forum” is here
 The API technical reference available after you install
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6. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Rough Product Guidelines
» Main factors impacting scalability
 Rough guidelines, we can’t test all combination of product, sizes, HW…
 We strongly encourage testing in your own environment. Lab instances are great practices.
6
Prod. Scalability impacted by Limit Notes
NPM Throughput=Elements (interface, volume, nodes) x
polling frequency
• 12K elements(1) per poller
• 100K elements(1) per instance
SAM Throughput=Component Monitors x polling frequency • 8-10K monitors(1) per poller
• 50K monitors(1) per instance
How do SNMP and WMI polling compare?
IPAM Number of managed IP’s • 3M IP’s per instance Does not support polling engines
NTA Flow per sec received • 10K flows/sec (DB limitation) per
instance
NTA 4.0: 40K flows per sec, multi poller possible but does not
increase the 40K flow/sec
NCM Throughput =Nodes x frequency of Inventory and Config
downloads
• 10K nodes per poller
• 30K nodes maximum
NCM performing 2 NCM operations (inventory update,
configuration download) per day on all 30K nodes.
UDT Number of managed ports • 150k ports per poller
• 500k port or more, maximum
VNQM IP SLA operations and CDR volume • 5K IP SLA operations and 200K calls per
day per poller
• 15K IP SLA operations and 200K calls per
day per instance
20K calls per hour as maximum in peak/rush hours
WPM Throughput=Number of transactions played back x
frequency
• Dozens of recordings per player Complexity of transactions determines limits per player and
requires specific testing
(1) At default polling frequency

7. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
The Vital Signs
» Database
 Available space (! Netflow)
 Disk I/O latency. Seen SAM’s AppInsight for SQL?
» Main server
 CPU bound
» WAN links
 To sites polled remotely (ICMP / SNMP / WMI traffic)
 To sites equipped with remote Poller
• ICMP (Kbits/sec)= (0.0823*y + 0.6774) * 8
• SNMP (Kbits/sec): ( 0.3949*y + 2.7756 ) * 8
• y= # nodes, with 12 Interfaces and 2 volumes per node
» Pollers
 Polling Completion
• Delay in polling, should be close to 100%.
• Check amount of CPU and Memory if lower than 100%
 Polling Rate:
• 85% means that you are approaching the maximum throughput that a poller is designed to handle
• >100% means that the poller will slow down the polling frequency to stay in the throughput limits
 More details here
7

8. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Integration

9. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Cross Product Navigation
» What else, beyond SSO, tabs and pages with resources from different products?
 Subviews facilitate navigation cross product, in the context of a node
 Resources augmented with information from other products
Home
NPM
Node
selection
Node
details
VNQM
Node
selection
VoIP
details
Home
NPM
Node
selection
Node
details
VNQM
Node
selection
VoIP
details

10. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Other Navigations Cross-Product

11. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Recent and Upcoming Integration Tabs
» Virtualization Manager
 Integration with SAM & NPM, exposing capacity, configuration
and performance data in context of Orion nodes
 Insight from Application to the Datastore, identifying contention of
virtual and storage resources
 New Storage sub-view per virtualization node (VC, DataCenter, Cluster,
Host, VM)
 Great recording: “Virtualization Manager 6.0 Integration with SAM and
NPM”

12. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Recent and upcoming integration tabs
» FSM
 Overall Firewall Security dashboard
 Improved config readability (Config Details)
 Access to Security and Cleanup reports

13. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Orion Integration Tips
» Customer and prospect feedback about lack of integration information
 What products integrate with the product that I own?
 What product does SolarWinds have, in general?
 What is the nature and benefit of the integration?
 How do I perform these integrations?
» Requires the browser to have internet access, not the server
» Demo

14. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Q&A
14

15. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Stay Connected & Learn More
» Stay Connected:
 Join the Federal and Government Group on thwack®
 Twitter®: @SolarWinds_Gov
 Call: 877-946-3751
 Email: federalsales@solarwinds.com
 Email our Government Reseller DLT®: solarwinds@dlt.com
» Learn More:
 Visit our Federal website: http://www.solarwinds.com/federal
 Watch a short demo video: http://www.solarwinds.com/sedemo
 Download a free trial: http://www.solarwinds.com/downloads/

16. © 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Thank You!
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