Maximum Elements per Poller / Polling Completion Rates in SolarWinds Platform

10/25/2018 7:00 PM

12/17/2025 4:42 PM

A discussion of Maximum Elements per Poller and Polling completion rates.

Network Performance Monitor

In the latest versions of NPM, you are able to scale monitoring from 10000 to 12000 elements. Status Polling is for Status, ResponseTimes, and PacketLoss, mostly over ICMP ping. Status Polling also checks an element's OID.

 

The default values for the Status Polling page are:

• Nodes: 120 seconds
• Interfaces: 120 seconds
• Volumes: 120 seconds

Status Polling has little resource overhead and default values can be changed to 60 or 30 seconds if needed.

 

For SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted environments running 2022.3 and newer, the maximum elements has been increased to 48,000:

48,000 elements at standard polling frequencies:

• Node and interface up/down: 2 minutes/poll
• Node statistics: 10 minutes/poll
• Interface statistics: 9 minutes/poll

25 - 50 concurrent SolarWinds Platform Web Console users

To monitor more than ~1,000,000 elements, consider using SolarWinds Enterprise Operations Console.

MIBs/Statistics Settings  

The default values for this page are:

• Nodes: 10 minutes
• Interfaces: 9 minutes
• Volumes: 15 minutes

Statistics measure CPU and memory, interface traffic, interface errors and discards, volume information, and more.

Note: If you set values lower than the defaults, this can result in gaps in report data.

 

Most MIBs, by default, will update the data sent to Orion once every five minutes. This means that by setting values at 1 minute, you are essentially requesting the same information five times (one request each minute). This causes extra resources to be used on your Orion server and your SQL Server. Routers/Switches can collect statistics every minute, but this is not by default.

 

Keep in mind that the default internal statistics polling on a Cisco device is set to 300 seconds, so this will not provide you any extra info in most cases.

Modifying the interval at which statistics are gathered 

By default, the Cisco IOS gathers statistics for the various counters at an interval of 300 seconds or five minutes. While this setting is suitable for most states of operation, there may be select periods where a more granular (or gross) interval is required. Keep in mind that changing the interval value will have an effect on the performance of the router. 

 

To change the statistics gathering interval, use the global load-interval command: 

load-interval 300

Where 300 is the number of seconds you wish to use as your interval. If you set the load-interval to a more granular value (such as 30 seconds), remember to set it back when you have completed your data gathering.

 

Take the following scenarios using the polling information outlined below:

• 9-10 minutes polling: the default value for nodes and interfaces statistic polling.
• 5 Minute polling: doubles the work done by a single poller.
• 1 Minute polling: adds additional work that must be done by a single poller.

A single poller can handle anywhere from 1,000 to 2000 elements per minute.

• Scenario A
  • You have 10000 elements.
  • Your polling is set to execute every 10 Minutes. 
  • This results in 1000 polls per minute.
• Scenario B
  • You have 10000 elements.
  • Your polling is set to execute every 5 Minutes.
  • This results in 2000 polls per minute, which is double the work done.
• Scenario C
  • You have 10000 elements.
  • Your polling is set to execute every 1 minute.
  • This results in 10000 polls per minute, equaling 10x the work done.

 

For additional information about the default database retention settings, see Default database retention settings for the Orion Platform.