How to check the server hardware using Orion Platform diagnostics

This article explains how to check the if SolarWinds Platform server meets the hardware requirements as recommended in the SolarWinds Platform requirements guidelines from the Diagnostic logs.

It can also be used by customers to validate the same directly from the SolarWinds servers.

Because not allocating enough CPU's or over allocating may have negate impact based on Virtualization platform in use and how CPU affinity and NUMA is configured at host level.

Terminology:
CPU Socket: is a physical connector on the motherboard to which a single physical CPU is connected. A motherboard has at least one CPU socket. Server motherboards usually have multiple CPU sockets that support multiple multicore processors. Intel and AMD use different CPU sockets for their processor families.

CPU core: is the part of a processor containing the L1 cache. CPU core performs computational tasks independently without interacting with other cores and external components of a “big” processor that are shared among cores. Basically, a core can be considered as a small processor built into the main processor that is connected to a socket. Applications should support parallel computations to use multicore feature.

Hyper-threading: is a technology developed by Intel to bring parallel computation to processors that have one processor core.  An operating system detects a single-core processor with hyper-threading as a processor with two logical cores (not physical cores). Similarly, a four-core processor with hyper-threading appears to an OS as a processor with 8 cores. The more threads run on each core; the more tasks can be done in parallel. Modern Intel processors support both multiple cores and hyper-threading feature. Hyper-threading is usually enabled by default and can be enabled or disabled in BIOS. AMD simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) is the analog of hyper-threading for AMD processors.

vCPU: is a virtual processor that is configured as a virtual device in the virtual hardware settings of a VM. A virtual processor can be configured to use multiple CPU cores. A vCPU is connected to a virtual socket.
 

Collect the system diagnostics 

1. Log in to your Orion Platform server.
2. Go to Start > SolarWinds Orion > Documentation and Support.
3. Launch the gray icon for Orion Diagnostics and click Start.
   A ZIP file is generated.
4. Right-click the file and select Extract Here.

Check the server hardware 

Check the system hardware to verify if it meets the SolarWinds minimum recommended specifications.

1. Go to the SystemInformation folder.
2. Open the SystemInfo.txt file and locate the system hardware specification.
   The following illustration is an example where the system is only assigned two CPU physical sockets, which does not meet the minimum recommendation of four CPU sockets.
3. Open the SysInfo.csv file.
4. Check the current CPU load on the system and CPU GHz level.
   The following table is an example where the CPU load is around 70% on the current system due to two main reasons: Low physical sockets assigned, and low CPU power (less than 3.0 GHz). 

   PARAMETER	VALUE
   OSVersion	Windows Server 2012 R2 (Microsoft Windows NT 6.2.9200.0)
   CPUInformation	Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2420 0 @ 1.90GHz
   CurrentCPUUssage	70 %

5. Make sure you have minimum of four physical processor sockets. For example:
   
   In this example, the system hardware does not follow the recommended SolarWinds production deployment requirements (Quad Core CPU, this customer has allocated only 2 Cores). As a result, the CPU load remains high in system resources. 
6. Check how much memory is assigned and available for the system.
7. Check Task Manager to see which application is consuming high memory.

A NUMA architecture divides memory and processors into groups, called NUMA nodes. From the perspective of any single processor in the system, memory that is in the same NUMA node as that processor is referred to as local, and memory that is contained in another NUMA node is referred to as remote. Processors can access local memory faster.

Most modern operating systems and many high-performance applications that typically scale to utilize many processors and large amounts of memory, such as Microsoft SQL Server, include optimizations that recognize and adapt to a computer’s NUMA topology. To avoid remote access penalties, a NUMA-aware application attempts to allocate storage for data and schedule processor threads to access that data in the same NUMA node. These optimizations minimize memory access latencies and reduce memory interconnect traffic.

Check the minimum hardware requirements. 

The following table lists minimum hardware requirements and recommendations for your SolarWinds Orion server. These minimum requirements are for the Orion Platform.

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

The hardware requirements are listed by SolarWinds NPM license level. See SolarWinds Platform requirements guidelines

Products that run on the Orion Platform may have different requirements, such as different operating system or memory requirements. Consult your product-specific documentation for the exact requirements. See the NPM system details. 

Please consult with your System team and make appropriate recommended changes to all of your polling Engines including Additional Web server.