SCP-500 Case Studies & Practical Application 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A compliance team requires that all network device configurations be validated against a security baseline (e.g., no Telnet enabled). In SolarWinds NCM, what feature enforces this automatically?
- NCM Policy Reports, which scan configs against defined compliance rules (Correct answer)
- Scheduled config backups with manual review
- SNMP trap monitoring for configuration change events
- Network Sonar Discovery with security templates
Correct answer: NCM Policy Reports, which scan configs against defined compliance rules
NCM Policy Reports evaluate stored device configurations against customizable compliance rules and flag violations automatically.
Question 2: An Orion administrator is asked to give the helpdesk team read-only access to a specific set of network nodes without exposing the full Orion environment. What feature should be used?
- Create a separate Orion polling engine for the helpdesk nodes
- Use Orion account limitations to restrict the helpdesk role to specific nodes or groups (Correct answer)
- Export node data to a separate reporting portal for the helpdesk
- Configure SNMP read-only community strings for the helpdesk team
Correct answer: Use Orion account limitations to restrict the helpdesk role to specific nodes or groups
Orion account limitations (node filters, group filters) restrict what a user account can view, enabling scoped read-only access without duplicating infrastructure.
Question 3: A SolarWinds administrator needs to alert the on-call engineer via SMS only between 10 PM and 6 AM when a critical server goes down. How should this be configured?
- Create two separate alerts — one for day and one for night — each with different notification actions
- Use an alert with a time-of-day condition and an SMS notification action scoped to the overnight window (Correct answer)
- Configure the on-call engineer's phone as the only notification target for all hours
- Set a maintenance window from 6 AM to 10 PM to suppress daytime alerts
Correct answer: Use an alert with a time-of-day condition and an SMS notification action scoped to the overnight window
SolarWinds alerts support time-of-day conditions so a single alert can trigger SMS notifications only during defined hours like overnight on-call windows.
Question 4: After deploying an additional polling engine, an administrator notices some nodes are being polled by both the main engine and the new one, causing duplicate alerts. What is the correct remediation?
- Delete and re-add all affected nodes to reassign them to one engine
- Assign nodes explicitly to polling engines using the Orion Polling Engine assignment setting (Correct answer)
- Disable polling on the main engine for the affected nodes
- Reinstall the additional polling engine to reset its node list
Correct answer: Assign nodes explicitly to polling engines using the Orion Polling Engine assignment setting
In Orion, nodes can be explicitly assigned to a specific polling engine via node properties, preventing dual-polling by multiple engines.
Question 5: A customer wants to auto-deploy a standard SNMP configuration to all new Cisco routers discovered in SolarWinds NCM. Which NCM feature accomplishes this?
- NCM Config Change Templates executed via an automated job (Correct answer)
- Orion Network Sonar Discovery with config templates
- SNMP trap forwarding to the new router on discovery
- NCM Manual Config Transfer wizard
Correct answer: NCM Config Change Templates executed via an automated job
NCM Config Change Templates paired with automated jobs can push standardized configuration snippets to devices matching defined criteria.
Question 6: An engineer wants to create a custom dashboard in Orion that shows WAN link utilization, top talkers, and server CPU — all in one view for the NOC. What is the correct approach?
- Export each metric to a CSV and combine them in a spreadsheet displayed on the NOC screen
- Create a custom Orion view by adding resource widgets from NPM, NTA, and SAM to a single page (Correct answer)
- Build a separate web application that queries the Orion REST API for each data type
- Configure PerfStack and save it as the NOC's homepage
Correct answer: Create a custom Orion view by adding resource widgets from NPM, NTA, and SAM to a single page
Orion views are fully customizable pages where resource widgets from any installed module (NPM, NTA, SAM) can be combined on a single display.
Question 7: A SolarWinds administrator notices that the Orion web console is slow and the SQL Server hosting the Orion database is at 95% CPU. What is the FIRST recommended action before making architectural changes?
- Immediately add a second polling engine to offload database writes
- Run the SolarWinds Orion Database Maintenance utility to rebuild indexes and purge old data (Correct answer)
- Upgrade the SQL Server to the next hardware tier
- Reduce the polling frequency of all monitored nodes
Correct answer: Run the SolarWinds Orion Database Maintenance utility to rebuild indexes and purge old data
Database index fragmentation and excessive data accumulation are common causes of Orion SQL CPU spikes; the maintenance utility addresses this before hardware changes.
SCP-500 Case Studies & Practical Application 4
A compliance team requires that all network device configurations be validated against a security baseline (e.g., no Telnet enabled).
In SolarWinds NCM, what feature enforces this automatically?