Network Management

NPM polls Cisco ACI controllers redundantly

If you are monitoring Cisco ACI devices with NPM and have enabled ACI polling on multiple ACI controllers (APICs), the data is polled redundantly. This article explains how to resolve this issue.

First published date

6/4/2019 6:55 PM

Last published date

5/14/2025 4:10 PM

Overview

If you are monitoring Cisco ACI devices with NPM and have enabled ACI polling on multiple ACI controllers (APICs), the data is polled redundantly. This article provides steps to resolve this issue.

Product section

Network Performance Monitor

Cause

Each controller has a full view of the ACI environment. Advanced ACI polling therefore only needs to be enabled on one of them.

If you poll all the controllers, you might see duplicate data in reports and alerts, and duplicate polling also means unnecessary load both on your APIC controllers and your Orion Platform environment.

SolarWinds recommends that you disable ACI polling for all but one of the controllers, but monitor all controllers as SNMP nodes to collect health and performance data about the controller itself.

Resolution

Disable ACI polling for all but one of the APIC controllers:

  1. On the Members subview, review the warning message that lists APICs that are polled redundantly.
  2. Decide which controller to keep ACI polling enabled. Consider polling the node with the least load or shortest response time.
  3. Clear ACI polling for all other APICs:
    1. Go to the Edit Properties page for an APIC.
      For example, you can go to the APIC's Node Details page and click Edit Node in the Management widget, or select the node in Manage Nodes (Settings > Manage Nodes) and click Edit Node.
    2. Scroll down and clear the Poll for Cisco ACI box.
    3. Click Submit.
  4. Repeat step 3 for all but one APICs.

NPM now collects only health and performance data about the controller. The ACI data is not polled on this APIC.