Network Management

Some SolarWinds Platform Services Fail to Start When a Proxy Is Configured

On machines where internet traffic is routed through a proxy server, certain SolarWinds Platform services may fail to start or continuously restart after installation or upgrade. This can also cause the Configuration Wizard to fail to complete.

First published date

7/15/2026 6:16 PM

Last published date

7/15/2026 6:16 PM

Overview

What You May Experience

  • One or more SolarWinds services (such as Job Engine or Feature Service) repeatedly restart and never reach a running state.

  • The Configuration Wizard fails during installation or upgrade with an error related to the Feature Service not starting.

  • The issue occurs on machines configured to use a proxy server, but only certain services are affected; others on the same machine continue to work normally.

Product section

Orion Platform

Cause

SolarWinds Platform includes both older and newer service components. These two generations of components handle proxy settings differently:

  • Older components automatically ignore the proxy for internal, local communication - as expected.

  • Newer components do not automatically skip the proxy for local addresses and may attempt to route internal traffic through the external proxy. Since the proxy server cannot reach addresses on the local machine, the connection fails.

This is a known behavior difference in the underlying technology used by the newer components, not a user misconfiguration.

Resolution

Workarounds

Choose the option that best fits your environment:

Option 1 - Recommended: Apply a Group Policy (GPO) for machine-wide proxy settings

If your environment uses Group Policy (common in enterprise environments managed by IT), ask your IT administrator to:

  1. Enable the policy: Make proxy settings per-machine (rather than per-user) in Internet Explorer settings.

  2. In the proxy configuration, ensure that "Bypass proxy server for local addresses" is checked, or that localhost is explicitly added to the bypass list.

This is the most reliable fix and ensures consistent behavior across all accounts on the machine.

Option 2 - Manual: Configure proxy bypass for the Windows system account

SolarWinds services run under the Windows Local System account, which has its own, separate proxy settings if the GPO is not used. Even if your regular user account is configured correctly, the system account may not be.

Option 3 - Environment variable: Set a system-level proxy exclusion

If the proxy is configured via the ALL_PROXY or HTTPS_PROXY environment variables, NO_PROXY variable can be used to bypass localhost and specific machines.