Free Practice Questions for SolarWinds Hybrid-Cloud-Observability-Network-Monitoring Exam

SolarWinds NTA (and Hybrid Cloud Observability) supports a range of flow technologies including J-Flow (used by Juniper devices) and sFlow (an industry standard for network monitoring and traffic analysis). GFlow and HFlow are not supported flow technologies in SolarWinds ' official documentation.

SolarWinds Log Analyzer and Hybrid Cloud Observability support log collection from current, supported Windows operating systems, such as Windows 10 (workstation) and Windows Server 2019. Older or unsupported versions like Windows Vista or Server 2012 may not be supported.

SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability supports a wide range of flow technologies for IP traffic monitoring. Per the SolarWinds NPM Administrator Guide:

" SolarWinds supports NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, and IPFIX for monitoring traffic flows. These protocols are used by devices from different vendors to export flow information. "

J-Flow: Used by Juniper devices and fully supported.

NetFlow (nFlow): The industry standard from Cisco and widely supported.

sFlow: A vendor-neutral flow technology supported by multiple devices.

IPF1X is not a recognized flow protocol in SolarWinds documentation.

SolarWinds identifies and classifies flow traffic based on application and port mapping in the platform.

" Unclassified traffic in flow charts often occurs when an application is not mapped in the system, or when the application uses a port that is not defined in the SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability (HCO) application mapping database. Flows from unsupported devices or flow direction do not cause unclassified application traffic—rather, they will not be collected or will be marked as unknown flows. "

Thus, unclassified traffic can result from new or custom applications or changes in port usage that are not reflected in the configuration.

If the flow source view in SolarWinds NTA shows “never received” and firewall issues are ruled out, it is often because the device (node) is no longer monitored by SolarWinds. If a node is removed or its monitoring is disabled, the collector will not associate incoming flows from that node, resulting in " never received " status.

The Universal Device Poller (UnDP) in SolarWinds allows you to create custom SNMP pollers. Results from UnDPs can be displayed as charts, gauges, or tables on SolarWinds web console views. The administrator guide states:

“Universal Device Pollers (UnDPs) allow you to collect SNMP data not provided natively by SolarWinds. The collected results can be displayed as charts, gauges, or tables, making it easier to visualize the custom metrics.”

Device Studio pollers are templates used to define UnDPs, but it is the UnDP that presents data visually. Hardware health and Network Insight are not custom pollers.

The most common cause of duplicate flow data in SolarWinds NTA is when source network devices are configured to export both ingress and egress flow data on the same interfaces. This results in the same traffic being reported twice, leading to inflated statistics and duplicate entries.

According to the SolarWinds Log Analyzer Administrator Guide (Version 2024.1) , Log Analyzer provides several built-in or native log entry actions as part of its log-processing rules. The key native log entry actions include:

Add a tag to the log entry : This action allows you to tag event logs for easier searching and filtering later.

Continue rule processing but do not save : With this action, the log entry is not saved but rule processing continues.

Halt further rule processing for the log entry : Selecting this action will immediately stop the processing of any more rules for the current log entry.

Sending an email notification is an alert action and not considered a native log entry action in the context of log processing rules.

Exact Extract from Official Guide:

" Key features in LA

Apply tags to event logs

Drop unwanted event logs in LA

Filter and analyze event logs

Filter and view event logs in live mode

Filter entry details in LA

Filter on log tags... " — (Log Analyzer Administrator Guide, Page 53-54)

Additionally, the guide specifies under Create custom log-processing rules in LA that actions such as tagging, halting processing, and not saving are among the native processing actions.

SolarWinds NTA processes flow data via a dedicated collector component. Devices are configured to export flow records to the NTA collector, which ingests, stores, and analyzes the data.

" NetFlow Traffic Analyzer receives flow data from network devices using the NetFlow Collector service, which processes and stores traffic information for analysis. "

No agent is required on target devices, and the collector is the key processing method.