High Availability (HA): Don’t Let a Single Failure Shut Down the Entire Operation!
With High Availability (HA), your monitoring services stay active. SolarWinds HA provides seamless failover across single or multiple subnets.
High Availability (HA) is an architecture that ensures the standby server takes over when your monitoring server fails. Thanks to SolarWinds HA, the platform continues to collect data and transmit alerts without being affected by failures; IT teams have uninterrupted access to up-to-date information.
What is High Availability (HA)?
The most common problems in IT infrastructures include single node failures, database crashes, network issues, and maintenance-related outages. These situations lead to the disabling of monitoring systems, missed alerts, and operational blindness. High Availability (HA) is a redundant and reliable architecture that ensures a system runs uninterrupted even during failures or maintenance.
When a system, application, server, or database fails, there is a risk that the entire service will stop. For example, if the SolarWinds or Zabbix monitoring server goes down, the corporate IT infrastructure becomes invisible and real-time alerts are not received. This means SLA breaches, service interruptions, and operational blindness.
HA makes critical components redundant and provides automatic failover in the event of a failure. Thus, the standby node takes over instead of the failed node, and the service continues:
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01
Uninterrupted Alerts Alerts and monitoring data are not lost.
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Operational Visibility Operational visibility continues without interruption.
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Secure Management Fault management and reporting continue securely.
It eliminates the single point of failure risk, which is critical for IT teams, and guarantees continuous monitoring of the infrastructure and service continuity. Addressing HA as part of your observability strategy strengthens both alarm and capacity management holistically.
SolarWinds High Availability (HA)
SolarWinds High Availability (HA) provides continuous failover protection for your main SolarWinds Platform server and additional polling engines. When your primary server fails or goes into maintenance, the standby server takes over all critical services like polling and alerting with minimal downtime. This protection covers the manager and additional polling engines; separate measures (e.g., a distinct DR or backup strategy) are required for databases or additional web servers.
SolarWinds HA supports physical→physical, physical→virtual, virtual→physical, and virtual→virtual failover scenarios in single subnet or multi-subnet configurations in an IPv4 environment. Using the same SolarWinds deployment, both High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery needs can be met through a single structure — this means you don't need to make a separate DR investment while automating your IT processes.
| Criterion | Single Subnet (Same Subnet) | Multiple Subnets (Different Subnets) |
|---|---|---|
| Location | Main and standby server in the same IP subnet | Standby server in a different IP subnet |
| Failover mechanism | Instant switch via shared Virtual IP (VIP) | Switch via updating DNS records |
| Requirement | Continuous status check (heartbeat) | Same DNS zone and same database resource |
| Best scenario | Single location, low latency requirement | Multiple locations, Wide Area Network (WAN) |
Uninterrupted Monitoring with SolarWinds HA
Thanks to High Availability (HA), your critical monitoring services remain up and running at all times; with SolarWinds HA, you get a secure, smooth, and uninterrupted monitoring experience through automatic failover and real-time synchronization in single or multiple subnets. This allows IT teams to keep the infrastructure under control at all times without losing operational visibility and continue NOC operations seamlessly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is High Availability (HA)?
It is a redundant architecture that ensures a system runs continuously even during failures or maintenance. Critical components are backed up, and the standby component is activated with automatic failover in the event of a failure.
Q: Which components does SolarWinds HA protect?
It protects the main SolarWinds Platform server (main polling engine) and additional polling engines. Databases and additional web servers are not directly included in the HA scope; separate measures are required for them.
Q: What is the difference between single subnet and multi-subnet HA?
In a single subnet structure, the primary and standby servers are in the same IP subnet and share a single virtual IP. In a multi-subnet structure, the standby server is in a different subnet; DNS records are updated during failover. Multi-subnet is preferred for multi-location WAN environments.
Q: What happens if the monitoring server fails without HA?
The corporate IT infrastructure becomes invisible, and real-time alerts are not received. This situation can lead to SLA breaches, service interruptions, and operational blindness.
Let's Plan Your SolarWinds HA Deployment Together
Contact the ODYA Technology team for a failover architecture that fits your single or multi-subnet scenario.
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