Network Management

Hardware Health polling stops when HWH timestamps are written in the future in SolarWinds Platform

Hardware Health polling can become blocked when a polling engine writes HWH_HardwareInfo.LastPollTime in the future because later poll results are then treated as older than the value already stored in the database.

First published date

7/6/2026 9:43 AM

Last published date

7/7/2026 6:16 PM

Overview

The Hardware Health data can stop updating because the polling infrastructure had stored a future timestamp in HWH_HardwareInfo. 

The future LastPollTime could prevent new poll results with earlier timestamps from being written back to the database.

Product section

Orion Platform

Cause

The underlying cause is clock desynchronization on a polling server, which allows Hardware Health poll results to be stored with timestamps ahead of real UTC time.

Once a poller engine is affected by Secure Time Seeding on Windows Servers, the Hardware Health is reported as not being polled because the date had shifted into the future for the affected node.

Engineering notes that the current HWH processing path accepts poll timestamps as provided and does not validate whether they are in the future before writing them to the database. The existing validation only checks whether the new poll time is greater than the stored poll time, which means a bad future timestamp can block all later normal results until manual intervention occurs.

 

Resolution

The first step is to verify time synchronization on all polling servers and on the SQL server, because the behavior starts with clock drift or time desynchronization.

Then, check if the STS fix has been applied on the pollers engines in order to avoid the STS issue in the future.

If future-dated HWH_HardwareInfo.LastPollTime rows are present, use the documented workaround:

  1. Backup the database.
  2. Stop Collector and Job Engine services on all polling servers.
  3. Reset future LastPollTime values in HWH_HardwareInfo to the current UTC time minus one hour using the following SQL query.
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update HWH_HardwareInfo
set LastPollTime = DATEADD(HOUR, -1, GETUTCDATE())
where LastPollTime > GETUTCDATE()
  1. Start Collector and Job Engine services again.
  2. Wait for polling to resume, typically around 10 minutes.

Please note the HWH data could take 1-2 hours to appear correctly in the web console.