Network Management

Status and Response time in the SolarWinds Platform (ICMP vs Status & Response Time Agent)

The article discusses the Agent response time against ICMP and how the two differ.

First published date

11/16/2018 9:58 PM

Last published date

5/12/2025 4:04 PM

Overview

The SolarWinds platform offers two kinds of polling for node status and response time on an agent node, Agent messaging and ICMP (Ping). Depending on your environment, one may have an advantage over the other, and this article details how status and response time polling works for each one.
 

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Product section

Orion Platform

Resolution

ICMP is a low-level messaging protocol. Because of its simplicity, it is impossible to accurately record the same response time values using a different protocol. For example, Agent messaging will report a response time in the 490-850 ms range, but a typical ICMP response time will do it in 150 ms.

 

Status & Response Time Agent messaging enabled in the List Resources page triggers the Agent to use the TCP port 17778 and do a 'pseudo-ping' -or- TCP ping instead of a basic 'Datagram' ping used by ICMP. 
 

  • ICMP pings are much faster as they use an IP Datagram packet.
  • TCP pings are slower due to the extra processing load to get verification in the network.

Diagram: 
 

Even though ICMP pings are faster, in some cases, you may still want to use Agent polling. Please look at Poll devices with SolarWinds Orion agents for more information.

SolarWinds recommends using ping (if possible) because this has the best consistency and is the fastest.
Change all agent nodes quickly: Bulk change the status and response time from ICMP to SNMP or vice versa