Why Your SolarWinds Orion Web Server Drives are Filling Up Over Time & How to Fix It

If you've had your SolarWinds Orion install for any length of time, you'll probably notice that the C: drives on the primary polling engine and/or any additional web servers (AWS) keep growing over time. The more support tickets you create, the faster these drives will fill up. Well, there's a reason for this...

When you generate a diagnostics from the Orion web console, it drops all of those hefty zip files on the C: drive of the web server that you were logged into when you generated them. Furthermore, it never cleans these up on it's own. If you're web server has been up for several years, you've probably got a pretty good chunk of disk sucked up by these diagnostic files.

They are easy enough to clean up though, if you know where they are hidden. Yes, they are literally hidden. They exist under the hidden file path of %ProgramData%\SolarWinds\Diagnostics. Typically, that ProgramData environment variable will point to C:\ProgramData which is a hidden folder, but the path can vary based on your server's configuration.

In order to automatically clean these up, I wrote the PowerShell script below and I run it daily from Task Scheduler. This simple one-liner will check the directory for any zip files older that 14 days and delete them. Typically, after you submit that zip file to support, you'll never use it again. So, you're not going to be missing anything by removing these old files.

You will probably have to run this PowerShell snippet in an elevated PowerShell window for it to access these files if they have their default permissions.

I also have this script available on GitHub as Remove-OldOrionDiagnosticFiles.ps1 if you'd prefer to grab it from there.