Hybrid-Cloud-Observability SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability Network Monitoring Practice Questions

Additional Polling Engines are designed with a store-and-forward mechanism for this exact scenario. If an APE loses connectivity to the main Orion server and its database, it will continue to poll its assigned devices and cache the results locally. Once connectivity is restored, the APE will forward the cached data to the main database. This default behavior perfectly matches the requirement to preserve historical data without needing a full HA or separate Orion instance, given that temporary loss of alerting is acceptable.

This statement is false. A single polling engine, whether it is the main poller or an additional poller, is typically rated to monitor up to 12,000 elements by default. Pushing a poller beyond this limit can lead to performance issues, such as missed polls and gaps in data. To monitor more than 12,000 elements, additional polling engines must be deployed.

Network Atlas is the dedicated tool within the SolarWinds suite for creating custom, dynamic network maps. It allows administrators to place monitored objects (like routers and switches) on a canvas, draw connection lines, and have the objects' statuses update in real time based on polling data. These maps can then be added as resources to web console views for display in a NOC.

The Class-Based Quality of Service (CBQoS) monitoring feature is designed specifically for this use case. By navigating to the CBQoS policy details for the relevant WAN interface, the engineer can see traffic classified by its QoS markings. This view shows traffic volumes before the policy is applied (pre-policy), after the policy is applied (post-policy), and any traffic that was dropped. It allows direct verification that traffic marked with DSCP EF is being correctly classified and prioritized by the QoS policy.

The best practice for filtering logs is to do it at the source to reduce unnecessary network traffic and processing load on the collector. On a Linux server using rsyslog, the administrator should edit the /etc/rsyslog.conf file. A rule can be added to specify that only messages of a certain severity level (e.g., *.err) or higher should be forwarded to the remote SolarWinds syslog server.

SolarWinds HCO requires both SNMP and CLI (Telnet/SSH) access to poll detailed information from Cisco ASA firewalls, including VPN tunnel statistics, access lists, and failover status. While basic node health can be retrieved via SNMP alone, the richer contextual data is gathered through command-line interaction.

Deploying an Additional Polling Engine (APE) within the AWS VPC is the correct architecture. The APE will initiate polling locally within the VPC, and only the summarized results will be sent back to the on-premises main Orion server. Security groups can be configured to allow polling from the APE's private IP, and the communication back to the main server can be tightly controlled, meeting the security requirement.

To create this specific alert, the trigger condition must be based on the 'Routing Neighbor' object, which contains the BGP state information. To ensure the alert only applies to core routers, the most scalable and manageable method is to use a custom property (e.g., 'DeviceRole = CoreRouter') to define the scope of the alert.

This statement is true. NetPath probes, which are the source of the path analysis traffic, can only be deployed on Windows-based main polling engines, additional polling engines, or other Windows machines running the SolarWinds agent. Linux agents do not support sourcing NetPath probes.

The most direct and accurate way to classify custom application traffic in NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) is by defining it in the application and service port monitoring settings. By navigating to NTA Settings and adding a new application that maps TCP port 2575 to a friendly name like 'EHR Application', all future flow records matching this port will be correctly categorized.