SolarWinds is known for its broad suite of IT monitoring and management tools, covering everything from networks and applications to databases and virtualization. Many MSPs use it to monitor complex environments across multiple client sites.
But as an MSP grows, the question becomes less about whether SolarWinds can support more sites and more about what it costs to support them. Every new site brings more devices under management, along with the infrastructure and expertise required to monitor them. In a SolarWinds environment, that can include additional polling engines, licensing, configuration work, and more ground for your SolarWinds specialists to cover.
For an MSP with a handful of clients, that overhead may be relatively easy to absorb. But at 50, 100 or several hundred client networks, it’s a much bigger consideration. How much infrastructure are you standing up with every new client? How many people on your team know how to manage it? And what happens to both as you keep growing?
Those are the questions that tend to get lost when we talk about whether a network monitoring platform can “scale.”
In this article, we’ll look at how SolarWinds’ deployment model works across multiple sites, where infrastructure and staffing requirements can start adding up, and how Auvik approaches the same challenge differently. If adding clients is the goal, your monitoring platform should make that easier, not give you another scaling problem to solve.
SolarWinds recommends a dedicated collector for every site you monitor
SolarWinds uses Additional Polling Engines (APEs) to extend monitoring beyond the primary polling engine. In a distributed environment, an APE can sit closer to the devices being monitored at a remote site or network segment, collect data locally, and connect that monitoring back to the broader SolarWinds environment.
An APE is its own piece of infrastructure. It runs on a server, needs to communicate with the primary SolarWinds environment, and comes with installation, configuration, connectivity and ongoing maintenance requirements. Under SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted’s current licensing model, APEs are available with Enterprise licenses for deployments with 500 or more nodes.
There’s also expertise involved. Someone needs to install and configure the APE, make sure devices are assigned and communicating correctly, and know how to troubleshoot it when something goes wrong. For an MSP evaluating the cost of adding another client environment, that operational requirement belongs in the calculation alongside the infrastructure and licensing.
For an MSP, that overhead repeats at every client site, not once
One additional polling engine might barely register for an MSP managing a handful of large client environments. But start scaling across dozens or hundreds of client networks and you’re dealing with a very different operational footprint.
There’s the infrastructure itself, but there’s also everything required to keep that infrastructure talking. APEs need connectivity back to the SolarWinds environment, with ports and firewall rules to configure and maintain. Depending on how your environment is deployed, you may also be managing VPN connections between sites. Every new connection introduces another dependency to configure, secure, monitor, and troubleshoot.
That’s a lot of technical overhead for a tool that’s supposed to help you manage technical overhead.
And infrastructure is only half of the equation. Every SolarWinds environment you add gives your SolarWinds-literate team more ground to cover. The same people who know how to configure and troubleshoot the platform are now responsible for another client’s monitoring infrastructure, on top of all the other work competing for their attention.
Auvik takes a different approach. It uses lightweight collectors too, so we’re not going to pretend network monitoring happens by magic. But Auvik collectors are part of the platform, and a single collector can even be shared across multiple sites when those sites have connectivity and non-overlapping IP address spaces. Where separate collectors make sense, they can be deployed as a Windows service, virtual appliance, Linux VM, or Docker image.
For an MSP, that flexibility matters. You can choose the collector setup that makes sense for the client environment without turning every new site into another infrastructure and licensing decision.
Internal IT teams feel the same effect on a different timeline. If you’re managing three relatively stable offices, you probably aren’t thinking about this every week. But when office number four opens, the infrastructure, connectivity, licensing, and people required to monitor it all come back into the budget conversation.
For MSPs onboarding clients continuously, that conversation happens over and over again. And eventually, you have to ask the question: how much of your team’s time and infrastructure do you want to spend managing the monitoring platform itself?
Scaling a SolarWinds environment means scaling specialized knowledge, not just infrastructure
Infrastructure is only one part of what makes a monitoring platform scalable. You also need enough people who know how to run it. This is especially important with SolarWinds because of the breadth and configurability of the platform. As your MSP adds clients, the same bench of SolarWinds-literate technicians has more environments to configure, maintain and troubleshoot. Eventually, you have to consider whether your team’s SolarWinds expertise can keep pace with your client growth.
SolarWinds rewards depth, which is a challenge when it lives in a few people
Having people on your team who know SolarWinds inside and out can be incredibly valuable. The challenge comes when too much of that knowledge lives with too few people. Every new client environment gives those specialists more ground to cover. They become the people who understand how everything is configured, get pulled into the tougher troubleshooting issues, and receive the escalation when someone else on the team hits the limits of what they know.
Most IT teams already have plenty of tools competing for that expertise. Auvik’s 2026 IT Trends Report found that 36% of MSPs and 26% of corporate IT teams are using 10 or more tools. At the same time, 48% of corporate IT respondents said a lack of time was preventing new initiatives from moving forward, while 33% pointed to insufficient staff. That’s a lot for any team to absorb. Deep expertise in one platform gets harder to maintain when your technicians are already switching between a growing stack of tools, clients, tickets, and priorities.
As the number of environments grows, more issues can end up funneling toward the same senior people, creating bottlenecks and making it harder to keep adding clients without adding similarly specialized capacity.
Auvik doesn’t require that specialist — any tier of tech can run it
There’s a reason SolarWinds requires deeper platform expertise: it does a lot. SolarWinds can bring network monitoring, databases, applications, virtualization, ITSM, and more into one broad ecosystem. For organizations that need that breadth, having people who know how to configure and get the most out of it can be well worth the investment.
But most MSPs don’t need every technician to become a SolarWinds expert just to solve a network problem. Auvik is purpose-built for network management, and that focus makes powerful network capabilities accessible across the entire team. A Tier 1 technician can open Auvik and get an up-to-date map of the network, see how devices are connected, work from pre-configured alerts, dig into device and traffic data, and start troubleshooting without years of experience with the platform.
On top of this, Auvik AI can help them go even further. Troubleshooting assistance surfaces relevant network context and helps technicians make sense of an issue faster, reducing the need to hunt for information, hand tickets between people, or escalate an issue because they’re not sure where to look next.
When frontline technicians can confidently investigate and resolve more issues themselves, senior engineers can focus on the problems that really require their expertise. New technicians can become productive faster, and the team you already have can support more clients and endpoints without bottlenecks.
Auvik’s collector is part of the base platform, so adding a site doesn’t add a tier
Auvik is designed so growth doesn’t change the product you’re using. Unlimited sites and users are included, while device pricing scales with volume. As you add more client networks, you continue managing them within the same platform rather than hitting a site threshold that pushes you into a different tier.
There’s flexibility in how you deploy collectors, too. Depending on the network, you can deploy a collector for an individual site or share one collector across multiple sites when connectivity and IP addressing allow it. Either way, the collector is part of the Auvik platform rather than a separate licensing decision each time your footprint grows.
This combination has proven especially valuable in multi-site and global environments. In Auvik’s own win-loss research, flexible collector deployment and the ability to centrally manage access across sites have both been cited as reasons customers chose Auvik over SolarWinds. The principle is simple: as you grow, your usage grows with you. The underlying product and deployment model stay consistent.
Role-based access matters more as the number of sites (or clients) grows
As an MSP grows, network management becomes a delegation problem. You might have 50 client environments in Auvik, but that doesn’t mean every technician should have the same access to all 50.
Role-based access control (RBAC) lets you manage those boundaries from one place, giving each technician access to the clients and capabilities relevant to their role. So as accounts get added and responsibilities shift, you can divide the work across your team without creating separate monitoring environments for every client.
This ease of use is especially important when it comes to our earlier point on preventing bottlenecks. Access to a tool is only useful if the technician you give it to can actually use it. With Auvik, a Tier 1 tech can be assigned to a client environment and immediately get to work with its inventory, maps, alerts, and troubleshooting tools without waiting for a platform specialist to step in.
For an MSP, those two pieces make all the difference:
- Centralized control lets you decide who handles each client
- An accessible platform lets more of your team do the work
That’s how you spread a growing client base across your team instead of funneling more work toward the same few specialists.
Auvik is a good fit for…
MSPs who regularly onboard new client networks
When new clients are coming through the door regularly, monitoring setup needs to be repeatable. Auvik lets you add sites and devices without evaluating a new infrastructure tier or APE requirement at every onboarding, making it easier to know what bringing the next client into your monitoring environment will involve.
MSPs that want network monitoring to fit their existing workflows
Your technicians already spend their days working across PSA, ITSM, and other MSP tools. Auvik offers native integrations with popular platforms in the MSP ecosystem, so network alerts and information can flow into the workflows your team already uses rather than creating another place they have to constantly check. The easier your tools work together, the less operational friction you add with every new client.
IT teams managing multiple offices or locations that expect to add more over time
Auvik gives multi-site IT teams a consistent way to bring new locations under management as the organization grows. Sites can be managed centrally, collectors can be deployed or shared based on the network environment and adding locations doesn’t force the team into a different product tier.
Teams that don’t want specialist hiring to scale with sites
Adding locations already creates more work for IT. It shouldn’t also require building a bigger bench of people who specialize in your monitoring platform. Because Auvik can be used effectively across technician levels, teams can expand their monitoring footprint without needing specialized platform expertise to grow at the same rate.
Organizations that want one centralized view across every site
Auvik brings inventory, maps, alerts and network visibility across sites into one console, with RBAC to put the right environments in front of the right people. That gives growing teams a practical way to centralize the platform while distributing the work across more technicians.
SolarWinds is a good fit for…
Low-site-count organization with no near-term plans to add locations
If you’re managing a small, stable number of locations, the infrastructure and staffing considerations we’ve covered are less likely to become a recurring concern. With no significant site growth on the horizon, you can design your SolarWinds environment around the footprint you already have.
Organizations that need SolarWinds’ broader observability modules
SolarWinds covers considerably more ground than network management alone, with capabilities spanning areas like database performance, application monitoring, virtualization, and IT service management. If bringing those functions together is a priority, and you have the infrastructure and expertise to support a broader platform, that breadth is a genuine advantage.
Teams who already have an in-house SolarWinds specialist
If you already have experienced SolarWinds administrators with enough capacity to support your current environment, the specialist dependency we’ve discussed is much less of a concern. For organizations with a relatively stable footprint, that expertise is already in place and can be put to good use.
Auvik is built for networks that grow, not just the one you have today
For an MSP, growth means the next client is always around the corner. Your network monitoring platform should be ready for them. With Auvik, bringing a new client site under management is designed to be repeatable: add the site, deploy or share a collector, discover the network, and add the devices you need to monitor. Unlimited sites and users are included, while volume-based device pricing scales with your managed footprint.
And as that footprint grows, Auvik keeps your network data together. Auvik AI can use network data across your managed environments, so adding clients doesn’t create new silos for troubleshooting and insights. Explore Auvik for MSPs and Auvik pricing to see how the platform can scale with your client base. Or, book an Auvik demo and ask the team to walk you through what a multi-site or multi-client deployment could look like for your MSP.
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Frequently asked questions
Does SolarWinds require a separate collector for every site?
Not necessarily. SolarWinds supports several deployment models for remote environments, including Additional Polling Engines (APEs) and Remote Collectors. Its documentation recommends adding APEs to remote sites in a centralized deployment when additional polling capacity or visibility is needed. The right architecture depends on the size, connectivity, and monitoring requirements of the environment.
What is an Additional Polling Engine (APE) in SolarWinds?
An Additional Polling Engine, or APE, extends the polling capacity of a SolarWinds deployment beyond its main polling engine. APEs can be deployed at remote sites to collect monitoring data and connect it back to the broader SolarWinds environment, giving organizations a way to scale monitoring across larger or distributed networks.
Does scaling to more sites mean I need SolarWinds-certified staff?
There’s no rule that says every new SolarWinds site requires another certified administrator. But as the number of sites and polling infrastructure grows, so does the amount of SolarWinds configuration, maintenance, and troubleshooting your team needs to support. As you grow, that typically requires people with deeper SolarWinds expertise, whether they’re on staff or brought in externally.
Auvik is designed so technicians across experience levels can be productive in the platform. That gives MSPs and IT teams more flexibility to spread network-management work across their team as they add sites, rather than having every issue depend on a small group of platform specialists.
How does Auvik handle multiple sites or client networks?
Auvik lets you organize networks into individual sites and group related sites into multi-sites, which is especially useful for MSPs managing multiple client locations. Collector deployment is flexible: you can use one collector per site, multiple collectors at a site, or a shared collector that monitors multiple sites when the networks have the required connectivity. Learn more about Auvik deployment strategies >
Is there a limit to how many sites or devices Auvik supports?
Auvik is built to support multi-site and large-scale environments, but individual collectors do have practical capacity guidelines. For example, Auvik currently recommends topping out a shared collector at around 200 sites, 1,500 devices, and 8,000 interfaces. As an environment approaches those limits, additional collectors can be deployed, and Auvik says all subscriptions include an unlimited number of collectors. See Auvik’s collector and system requirements >
Does adding a new client site change my Auvik contract?
Adding a site itself doesn’t create another collector charge, because all Auvik subscriptions include unlimited collectors. Pricing is based primarily on the devices you actively manage, with many discovered devices monitored for free and volume discounts available as device counts increase. MSPs also have dedicated pricing packages.
So as you onboard clients and add billable devices, your subscription volume and cost can grow with your managed footprint. But you don’t have to purchase another collector license simply because you added another site. For exact contract implications, MSPs should confirm the terms of their specific agreement with Auvik. See how Auvik pricing works >
Do I need to redo onboarding work every time I add a site in Auvik?
No. You’ll need to do some site-specific setup, but you’re not starting from scratch every time you onboard a new client network. Auvik automatically discovers and maps the network once the collector is connected and scanning the appropriate subnets. Depending on the environment, you can deploy a new collector or share an existing collector across multiple sites, so even the collector setup doesn’t necessarily need to be repeated for every location.
The result is a repeatable onboarding process within the same Auvik platform, rather than a new monitoring deployment to design and stand up for every client. Learn more about Auvik deployment strategies >
