Orion
Platform 2020.2 - Performance & Scalability Improvements
In addition to the multitude of features delivered in The Orion platform 2020.2 such as centralized upgrades, significant performance improvements have also been gained across the platform and its modules. When combined with improvements to the install/upgrade experience and Increased scalability for both Network Performance Monitor and Server & Application monitor it offers a platform that is more powerful, more scalable, and more reliable.
Performance
A number of key areas for improvement are included when considering the performance improvements included in the Orion platform 2020.2 *
- Improving the legacy website.
- Improving poorly performant resources
- Optimizing expensive queries.
- New Angular based dashboard system
This strategy to improve website performance covered multiple facets of Orion. Classic dashboards aren’t going away anytime soon, It is important to make them as responsive as possible and so we have invested in optimizing the most frequently used pages and resources. There are limits to how WebForms and other server-side rendering technologies perform. For that reason, a new UI tech stack was used for modern dashboards
Note: Performance gains will vary. Environment variables such as database performance, Choice of browser, browser add- ons and client machine specs will impact performance.
Eliminating 'Cold Start'
When improving the performance of the legacy website we started with the 1st page users typically see, the login page.
In testing, eliminating 'Cold Start' delivered a 96% improvement! *
“Cold Start” is similar to starting your car in the morning. It will take some time to warm up after being left idle for an extended period. In some cases for Orion this could be more than 20 seconds! While still faster than warming up your car, it can feel like an eternity when looking at a blank page! For those who want more detail here, we have made some changes under the hood as to how the Orion IIS Application Pool recycling is managed.
2020.2 Vs 2019.4
Summary and Node Details Views
From there we focused on the most used views. Load times of the Summary and Node Details Views along with the All Reports and All Active Alerts pages have been improved
Summary view optimization has resulted in an average 35% improvement in our lab tests.*
2019.4 Vs 2020.2
All Active Alerts & All Reports
Although not as fast as an engine management indication on a car's dashboard, The Active alerts page was on average 67% faster in testing.*
2019.4 Vs 2020.2
Modern Dashboards
Modern dashboards have been created with performance in mind. A simple comparison between a modern dashboard and classic summary view using the same data for 3 widgets shows a marked improvement. *
2020.2 Vs 2019.4
Additional Improvements
Install & Upgrade
The install and upgrade process is a critical component to the performance improvements that were made as a part of the 2020.2 release. These enhancements specifically aim to reduce the downtime needed to install or upgrade your environment. As a part of these efforts, a significant investment was given to optimizing the configuration wizard itself. While we don’t want to get to far into the technical details, these adjustments range from revamping the database creation phase to the compilation of the website. Along with other boosts such as parallelization of the config wizard tasks, the combination of these updates resulted in a drastic reduction in the total run time of the configuration wizard.
In addition to these changes, there was also special attention given to the upgrade process. A new ability to Pre-Stage your environment directly from the web console alleviates administrative overhead and provides A GATEWAY TO YOUR FASTEST UPGRADE EVER!
Miscellaneous
Other improvements have been delivered which are not visually demonstrable but which are know to contribute to overall page load times. These range from optimizing SWIS queries to more effective caching of query data to changing the render method of selected classic widgets. *
The sum of all these changes should have a noticeable impact on the performance of your Orion platform.*
Scalability
Network Performance Monitor
Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
With this release, NPM can now monitor up to one million elements per Orion Platform instance! Our customers are likely aware of the previous maximum per-instance capacity of 400k elements as of the 2018.2 release. We couldn't be happier with the additional value this expanded scale will provide specifically to our enterprise customers who were facing difficult decisions around what to monitor as they reached previous capacity limitations. As of the 2020.2 release, we've increased the maximum load that can be placed on a properly resourced NPM instance by 250%! The Orion platform has never been better equipped to comprehensively monitor global-scale environments with device-level precision.
Server & Application Monitor
Server & Application Monitor (SAM)
In SAM, with our release we now support an upper limit of 550,000 Component Monitors! For those of you who have been longtime SAM customers, you know that our previous limit for a SAM installation was 150,000 Component Monitors, so we are proud of the improvement that the team has delivered. In general, you should see better scale especially, if you choose to use our improved WinRM monitoring support in our application templates. You will see more predictable WMI monitoring query resource consumption, that will help reach ever greater scale. In addition to the increase to 500,000 Components for a single SAM installation, you'll see that for SAM node-licensed customers each included additional polling engine (not the main) will now support up to 40,000 Component Monitors. This will help those larger installations to use less server resources, which we are excited to see the ways it will simplify your deployment.
*Performance improvements of Orion Platform 2020.2 verified in SolarWinds lab against the previous version. Actual improvements may vary.
