Network Management

Polling methods used by the Orion Platform

Differences between polling methods used by Orion

First published date

10/24/2018 6:41 PM

Last published date

9/14/2023 11:05 AM

Overview

This article discusses the following kinds of polling methods to collect performance information from monitored devices:

  • ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol)
  • SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
  • WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation)
  • Agents

Product section

Orion Platform

Cause

N/A

Resolution

ICMP - Internet Control Message Protocol

Orion Platform products use the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) to poll for status using ping and echo requests of managed devices.

  • If the device is operationally up, it returns a response time and record of any dropped packets. This information is used to monitor status and measure average response time and packet loss percentage for managed devices.

    Orion Platform products only use ICMP to poll devices for status, average response time, and packet loss percentage. Other information displayed in the Orion Web Console is obtained using SNMP requests.

For more information, please visit:

SNMP - Simple Network Management Protocol

For most network monitoring and management tasks, SolarWinds Orion products use SNMP.
  • To monitor devices on your network, you must enable SNMP on all devices capable of SNMP communications. The steps to enable SNMP differ by device, so you may need to consult the documentation provided by your device vendor.
  • If SNMPv2c is enabled on a device you want to monitor, by default, SNMPv2c is used to poll the device for performance information. If you only want to poll using SNMPv1, you must disable SNMPv2c on the device to be polled.

For more information about MIBs, please visit:

For more information about SNMP, please visit:

WMI - Windows Management Instrumentation

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is a proprietary technology used to poll performance and management information from Windows-based network devices, applications, and components. When used as an alternative to SNMP, WMI can provide much of the same monitoring and management data currently available with SNMP-based polling with the addition of Windows-specific communications and security features.

For more information about WMI, please visit:

  • About WMI (© 2021 Microsoft, available at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wmisdk/about-wmi?redirectedfrom=MSDN, obtained on May 13, 2021)

Due to specific characteristics of WMI polling requests, polling a single WMI-enabled object uses approximately five times the resources required to poll the same or similar object with SNMP on the same polling frequency.

Agents 

An agent is software that provides a communication channel between the Orion server and a Windows or Linux/Unix computer. Products install plugins on agents to collect the data that the agents send back. This can be beneficial in situations such as:

  • Polling hosts and applications behind firewall NAT or proxies.
  • Polling nodes and applications across multiple discrete networks that have overlapping IP address space.
  • Secure, encrypted polling over a single port.
  • Support for low bandwidth, high latency connections.
  • Polling nodes across domains where no domain trusts have been established.
  • Full, end-to-end encryption between the monitored host and the main polling engine.

You can monitor servers hosted by cloud-based services such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and other Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

After the agent is deployed as per this documentation:

Communication between the Orion server and the agent occurs over a fixed. The list of required ports for agent-based monitoring is listed in this documentation: 

This communication is fully encrypted using 3072-bit TLS encryption. The agent protocol supports NAT traversal and passing through proxy servers that require authentication.

While changing the polling method from SNMP to WMI, make sure to List Resources and select intended objects/properties for polling.