How to Bulk Disable/Enable Topology Polling on All SolarWinds Orion Nodes (SQL)

If you're not familiar with topology polling, it is used by SolarWinds Orion to determine the node-to-node dependencies. So, for example, if a switch goes down you would get an alert for the switch and not for all of the dependent child nodes that are plugged into the switch.

One of the SolarWinds Orion environments that I took over had topology polling disabled on a large portion of the nodes. This prevented a lot of dependencies from being created which otherwise would have been.

Of course, you could go through all of the nodes one at a time, hit the list resources button, and add topology polling back to each one of them. Or, you could run a simple SQL query to enable it on each of the nodes that have it disabled.

Let's start by identifying which nodes have topology polling disabled. The select statement below will find all of them and also get the related node information from the NodesData table so that you sanity check what you're going to change.

	SELECT n.Caption
	, n.IP_Address
	, n.Vendor
	, n.MachineType
	, p.PollerID
	, p.PollerType
	, [Enabled]
	FROM Pollers p
	INNER JOIN NodesData n ON n.NodeID=p.NetObjectID
	WHERE PollerType LIKE 'N.Topology%' AND [Enabled] = 0

view raw Get-DisabledTopologyPollers.sql hosted with ❤ by GitHub

If all of the results look good to you, the query below can be used to enable topology polling on any nodes that have the setting explicitly disabled.

	UPDATE Pollers
	SET [Enabled] = 1
	WHERE PollerType LIKE 'N.Topology%' AND [Enabled] = 0

view raw Enable-TopologyPollers.sql hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Easy peasy! I have a couple variations of these on GitHub if you want to go the other way and disable topology polling in mass. Those are linked below

• Disable-TopologyPollers.sql
• Enable-TopologyPollers.sql
• Get-DisabledTopologyPollers.sql
• Get-EnabledTopologyPollers.sql

How to Bulk Disable/Enable Multicast Polling on All SolarWinds Orion Nodes (SQL)

When I was doing SolarWinds consulting, I ran into a lot of clients complaining about poor database performance in relation to their multicast routing tables having millions of rows in them. These customers were often looking a quick and easy way to identify all of the nodes which have multicast polling enabled on them, as well as a way to quickly disable it.

First things first. If you want to identify which nodes have multicast polling enabled, you can run the SQL query below in Database Manager or SQL Server Management Studio.

SELECT n.Caption
, n.IP_Address
, n.Vendor
, n.MachineType
, p.PollerID
, p.PollerType
, [Enabled] 
FROM Pollers p
INNER JOIN NodesData n ON n.NodeID=p.NetObjectID
WHERE PollerType LIKE 'N.MulticastRouting%' AND [Enabled] = 1

Whether you have used the query above to identify the nodes with multicast polling enabled or not, the SQL query below can be used to disable multicast polling on any nodes in Orion that currently have them enabled.

UPDATE Pollers
SET [Enabled] = 0
WHERE PollerType LIKE 'N.MulticastRouting%' AND [Enabled] <> 0

If you want to enable multicast polling on them again, you can just change the enabled line to equal one where it currently equals zero, like below.

UPDATE Pollers
SET [Enabled] = 1
WHERE PollerType LIKE 'N.MulticastRouting%' AND [Enabled] = 0

Below are links to these SQL queries on GitHub:

• Disable-MulticastPollers.sql
• Enable-MulticastPollers.sql
• Get-DisabledMulticastPollers.sql
• Get-EnabledMulticastPollers.sql

How to Set Node Captions to Lower Case Host Name in SolarWinds Orion Using PowerShell

By default, SolarWinds Orion will use either the sysname it gets from the device via SNMP, WMI, or the agent, etc. when it sets the nodes name in the "caption" field. If it can't get the sysname, it will try to get a name from reverse DNS and use that if it is available. Unfortunately, this can leave the node names inconsistent where some will have be using a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) and other won't. Some will use capital letters, while others will be lower case. 

I wrote a PowerShell script which will truncate the name down to the hostname and convert all of the letters to lower case. This makes viewing a list of nodes much easier on the eyes when they are all consistent, especially if you have a touch of OCD. I have the full script available on GitHub here, if you'd like to download it.

I tried to dummy-proof the script a little bit. So, you'll notice that the first section will check that the OrionSDK is installed and that the snap-in has been loaded, which is a prerequisite requirement. 

The second section will prompt you for credentials to log into the SolarWinds SWIS API. I use the export-clixml and import-clixml cmdlets to store and retrieve the credentials. These cmdlets use the "Windows Data Protection API" to securely encrypt/decrypt the credentials.

The next section creates a connection to the SolarWinds SWIS API. It will check to see if there's already an "Orion" environment variable. If not, it will prompt you for the hostname or IP address of the primary Orion server and cache it in the "Orion" environment variable. That way it doesn't have to ask you for the Orion server again the next time you run the script.

I also use the "ScriptLogPath" environment variable to cache the directory where you want to store the script logs. If this hasn't been set yet, it will prompt you for a file path. The next section roll these logs if they are over 10 MB.

Finally we are getting to the guts of the script. First, we'll query the Orion API for nodes in the private IP space which have alphabetic characters, a period, and no spaces in it's name. I limited it to the private IP space because if it's an external node, the domain is probably more useful and probably wants to be preserved. If it has a period, it obviously isn't just a hostname. Finally, if it has a space, it's probably a custom caption of sort, so we won't mess with it.

The script takes all of the results from the query above, splits them at all of the periods and takes the first section for the new caption. It then converts that new caption, converts it to lower case and writes it back to the Orion API.

The final section of the script uses the ExecuteSQL verb in the Orion.Reporting path of the Orion API to get any remaining nodes that has a capital letter in it's name. We do it this way because the Orion API isn't able to use case sensitive regex to find the nodes. The Orion database typically uses SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS for collation, which is case insensitive. By piping the SQL query into SQL through the ExecuteSQL verb, we can force it to use the Latin1_General_BIN collation for this query. We then manually build a URI for that node, convert the caption to lower case, and update the node via the Orion API.

I hope this is useful for you. As always, test any scripts before using them in production. Feel free to catabolize the parts that are important to you, and drop what isn't.

Full Script: Set-OrionCaptionToLowerCaseHostName.ps1

Prelude

I have been working with SolarWinds products for many years now. I've done everything from professional services across the SolarWinds portfolio of products to systems engineering and administration jobs. I've even earned five SolarWinds SCP certifications. Over the years, I've learned a lot of tips and tricks, as well as developed an extensive archive of PowerShell scripts, pollers, SWQL and SQL queries, etc. As I have time, I'll be cleaning up my code, posting the details here, and building out a related GitHub repository. Bookmark the site, subscribe to the RSS feed, etc... there's a lot of good things coming down the pipe!

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