Monitoring SolarWinds SAM (private preview)

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is an Orion module, which is built on the SolarWinds Platform. SolarWinds SAM monitors applications and server nodes that are stored on the SolarWinds Platform database through statistics. For more information about the SAM product, see SolarWinds SAM documentation.

After you install the Instana host agent, the SolarWinds SAM sensor is automatically installed. You can view the SolarWinds SAM monitored hosts and their associated metrics and alerts in the Instana UI after you configure the sensor. For more information about the configuration, see Configuring the SolarWinds SAM sensor.

Supported information

Supported operating systems

The operating systems that are supported for the SolarWinds SAM sensor are consistent with the host agent requirements. To find the supported operating systems for every host agent, see the Supported operating systems section of each host agent, such as Supported operating systems for Unix.

Supported versions

Instana supports metrics and events from SolarWinds SAM 2023.1 and later.

Collecting data

The SolarWinds SAM sensor is a remote-only sensor that connects to a SolarWinds SAM instance to collect the following information:

  • Entities: Hosts and processes
  • Events (SolarWinds SAM Alerts)
  • Metrics:
    • Host: CPU, memory, disk, and network
    • Process: CPU and memory

Prerequisites

The SolarWinds SAM REST service is only available when HTTPS is enabled in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console configuration. For more information about how to enable HTTPS, see the SolarWinds Platform documentation.

Configuring the SolarWinds SAM sensor

To connect to the SolarWinds SAM instance, you must configure the SolarWinds sensor with the endpoint and authentication. You must configure the following fields in the agent configuration file <agent_install_dir>/etc/instana/configuration.yaml:

com.instana.plugin.solarwinds:
  enabled: true             
  endpoint: 'https://solarwinds.host.com:17774' 
  username: 'redacted'
  password: 'redacted'
  poll_rate: 30
  target_zone: 'SolarWinds_SAM'

The following table contains the supported configuration options:

Name Type Required Default Description
enabled boolean Yes false This parameter enables or disables the sensor.
endpoint string Yes N/A The endpoint of the SolarWinds SAM service API.
username string Yes N/A The username to access SolarWinds SAM service.
password string Yes N/A The password to access SolarWinds SAM service.
poll_rate integer No 30 The number of seconds between metric queries. You might need to adjust this time to account for any rate limit imposed by your endpoint.
target_zone string No N/A The name of the generic zone where your SolarWinds SAM monitored hosts are displayed on the Instana Infrastructure Map. If the zone is not specified, hosts are displayed in Undefined Zone.

SolarWinds SAM endpoint

The Instana SolarWinds sensor uses the SolarWinds SAM API to collect information about the hosts (nodes) that SolarWinds SAM is monitoring. The endpoint URL used by the sensor is equivalent to the base URL of the SolarWinds Information Service (SWIS) REST endpoint. It is typically https://<solarwinds-host>:17774.

According to the SolarWinds documentation, SolarWinds Orion Platform uses port 17774 for REST communication. Port 17778 was used until the 2022.4.1 release but is deprecated starting with the 2023.1 release.

SolarWinds SAM authentication

The username and password are the credentials that are required to access the SolarWinds SAM service. The REST API uses basic authentication.

Viewing metrics

To view the metrics, complete the following steps:

  1. From the navigation menu in the Instana UI, select Infrastructure.
  2. Click a specific monitored host.

You can see a remote host dashboard with all the collected metrics.

Configuration data

  • OS (name, version, and distribution)
  • CPU count
  • Total Memory
  • Hostname
  • Filesystem Capacity

Performance metrics

  • CPU Used %
  • CPU Load
  • Memory Used
  • Swap Used
  • Swap Total
  • Filesystem (used and free)
  • Filesystem (reads and writes)
  • Network RX and TX Bytes
  • Network Incoming and Outgoing Errors per second
  • Network Incoming and Outgoing KB per second

Viewing events

SolarWinds SAM manages alerts and associates them with entities that SolarWinds SAM monitors. The SolarWinds sensor imports all SolarWinds SAM alerts to Instana as issue and change events based on the alert severity. To view the issues or changes, complete the following steps:

  1. From the navigation menu in the Instana UI, select Events.
  2. To filter events of a specific type, select the Changes or Issues tab.
  3. To filter events that are imported from SolarWinds SAM, enter the following query in the search box: entity.remote.host.source:Solarwinds

You can see a list of the events that are imported from SolarWinds SAM.

Troubleshooting

Agent monitoring issues

If the SolarWinds sensor cannot communicate with the SolarWinds SAM REST service, an agent monitoring issue is created. The issue describes the incorrect configuration parameter. For example, if the sensor receives an HTTP 401 or 403 error from the SolarWinds server, the username or password is likely incorrect or expired. The following configuration parameters can lead to agent monitoring issues:

  • endpoint
  • username or password (HTTP 401 or 403)
  • poll_rate (HTTP 429)

Static agent issues

If you encounter issues with the static agent, verify the error messages in the instana-agent/data/log/agent.log file.

Agent OutOfMemoryError

If you are connected to a SolarWinds SAM service that monitors many hosts, you must increase the JVM heap size of the Instana agent. If you find an OutOfMemoryError in the agent log, you must increase the maximum heap size of the Instana agent. For more information, about the JAVA_OPTS environment variable, see Environment variable reference.