Default database retention settings for the SolarWinds Platform

This article provides information about the default database retention settings.

For information about optimizing your database,

see Optimize the data you retain in the database.
Also, see Quick Orion database health check guide.
 

SolarWinds strongly recommends only touching the default Database Settings if you are sure you need to make changes.
 

If you need to change the database settings to increase retention, please consult SolarWinds support and consider your SQL deployment environment.
 

(Changing database retention settings can immediately increase the database size and create performance issues loading graphs and applications such as web pages, historical charts, statistical data, Services connection to the Orion DB, TempDb growth, and high table fragmentation.) 

SQL Server instance workload will prevent expanding the TempDB database data and log files very frequently, taking into consideration that the file expands process is an expensive process in which SQL Server Engine will request extra space from the operating system, which will perform zeroing on that space before allocating it to SQL Server Engine.

After changing the default database retention settings, you can imagine the time and resources required for this allocation process. 

Database Best Practices for SolarWinds Platform Health

Polling Settings

To access the default database and network settings, complete the following steps:

1. Log in to your SolarWinds Platform Web Console with an administrator account. 
2. Click Settings > All Settings > Polling Settings.

For information about default values, refer to Polling Settings in the NPM online help.

And to find out the non-default value i.e. values that were changed.
1. Open Database Manager or SQL Server Management Studio and run the following SQL query against SolarWinds Orion DB.

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SELECT name, currentvalue, defaultvalue 
FROM settings 
WHERE name like '%reten%' and currentvalue <> defaultvalue

In some cases, you can't edit the threshold, and a red dot appears beside the value. This means that the value is too low or high. To know what value you can set, just hover your mouse on the red dot, and it will show the value you can use.