Hi
Can we get a summer release that only fix old problems?
new features vs. old problems
No aps No stacks just bugs!!!
Completely agree... appstack, netpath, perfstack are prime examples of this. Great bells and whistles to lure in new customers and people like managers who like pretty dots, diagrams and pictures but ultimately provides little in the way of enhancing the core functionality of Solarwinds.
One of the worst parts about these posts that have indicated "were working on it" if you ask, no one even gives you a clue as to where the devs are at
Yes.
PLEASE FIX THE MANAGE NODES PAGE!!!!
- Add the ability to manage volumes the same way that Interfaces can be managed
- Allow Group by and sorting of node properties when managing Interfaces and Volumes.
- Add advanced sorting and filtering so that we can group, sort, and filter nodes, volumes, and interfaces by several different properties. Kind of like how the Custom Property Editor works.
Seriously, this bugs me so danged much. It is such an important screen within the Orion web console and it has had no major upgrades or fixes since I started working with Orion over 6 years ago. It's crazy. Especially when you go into the NCM Manage Nodes screen and you can group nodes by three different levels of properties. Why can't I at least do that in the Orion Manage Nodes screen?
Well, one thing SolarWinds will never do is tell you when a new feature or bug fix will be out. The best they'll ever say is soon, and that is only generally when they are real close. They never break a promise because they never break a promise. It's annoying, but I understand why they do it. With a product this complex sometimes it's not immediately obvious how plausible an idea or bug fix they are working on is to implement for all users until they are far into working on it. It's better that they keep it real vague and make no promises, otherwise they could get into some pretty deep waters with their customers.
- SNMP Traps with advanced alerting
- Monitoring SQL Clusters (AppInsight) using a Orion Agent
- Reporting facility is diabolical. For example, My DBA's would like to write a report on the size of the MDF files across all instances/DBs and the options to do this are just not there, including trend etc.
- 'What were working on' seems to be the equivalent to 'We might work on this when we get bored' (Ive seen 'What were working on' for feature requests that are 4-5 years old)
Its very frustrating when you are in the implementation stages and have just purchased this software to then realize its not all what it was advertised as!
I have asked many queries to many SW (At conferences & via email) and not received any response at all.
as above i am currently implementing the newly purchased SAM solution and already im having to put workarounds in place because the system cannot do the basics, im also having performance issues with my SWDB on Page Writes/sec - My appinsight for SQL for the SolarWinds Orion server will not stop alerting due to this.
Seems like everybody feels neglected by a company/software that was thought highly of by my technical contacts..
I was on a call with a product manager and pointed out that features I was waiting on had been 'under development' for years.
They were unaware of the status on thwack
The status has now been reset.
I hate to suggest this, but if you really need a feature reach out to the PM directly
We will never see a perfect monitoring product - SolarWinds has hundreds of bugs and nuances that we have to live with.
I find it hilarious though that people are getting intoxicated with the cloud solutions out there - they can't even touch SolarWinds yet.
But one will come along that's not a giant buggy mess of .NET spaghetti code and hopefully save us all with total automation that goes one level higher than SCOM.
A tool that is smarter, that requires little intervention because the developers spend time creating rules and monitors that are second nature for their respective applications.
Anywhoo....I'm with you. There is so much SolarWinds has to do to get to a better point. Right now the Orion application suite is so heavy that it most likely needs to be rewritten. Just as SCOM needs a complete rewrite for the web UI. Such heavy, heavy applications have no business in 2017.
Open up the Azure console, this what the future will resemble. Lightweight, browser based, totally automated. We are years away from the perfect monitoring solution where we hand a tool proper credentials and it does its thing, server by server. Exactly what SCOM does but on a higher level.
What we're working on tag at SW means that 1/100th of the features that need serious attention, will ever get it. Instead, as others have pointed out, 0 commitment is made, and 0 work is done to core features that have needed attention since 2007/8. Such as Core Trap Receiver, Core Syslog (so incredibly broken it's funny, including the almost useless "Search Syslog Messages" page.
There are quite a few great performance enhancements, diagnostics capabilities (Hubble), and some significant performance at scale in the last 10 years, and yet there are many, many, completely broken aspects.
1) Web Reporting UI / features / capabilities. Where to even start with that pile of steaming ****. How about, just ****ing implement the core features of Report Writer faithfully, instead of implementing this multi-screen **** that can't even do the simple things it's predecessor has done. I've talked with plenty of support people who more or less share as much of the same opinion as they can on a recorded call.2) Some of your call centers are staffed by people with atrocious skills, to the point where they don't know how to guide anyone trying to solve a business problem anymore. Subtle Hint, it's not Cork, or Austin.
3) Scheduled Reporting, exports of charts / graphs or tangible data in the form of CSV. More mostly broken lukewarm ****.
4) Bloat creep. Back in 2007, the platform had far fewer sub-components and features (both included and separately licensed). These days, it's nuts. Strong Recommendation to take the sort of modular product, and have the config wizard actually not start up components that are unused and not even turned on globally.
5) Some segregation is good, some less good. How many tables exactly do we need for data related to a single node? How many tables do we really need with 3-5 columns? Why is it the Websites table is still irrevocably broken and has to keep autopopulating the windows server name (which means basically *NOTHING* to a web based application?
These are all obvious things that I'm certain senior support staff have brought to dev attention, and there's a myriad of issues still remaining as "what we're working on" feature request that get crapped on so we can have built in wireless AP monitoring (obviously for large and small Enterprise customers). Like, great, I'm sure that got you guys into places and more market share, but please get to fixing all of the ridiculously broken **** and start trimming down the bloat so that each customer has a custom environment that suits their actual needs.
Peter
And of course, the comments will be moderated. Let's make sure we paint the prettiest possible picture.
How's that old saying go? You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.
There is something about pigs analogies
:-)
I love this one from
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1925.txt
3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead.
Not entirely sure this should be filed under a feature request, as a bug fixing pass is not really a feature, as such. Hence, I've down voted it. However, this thread has given me an idea:
As users of the Orion platform, we have a golden opportunity to ensure the bugs that we find are addressed, by reporting them to support. What would be a better idea is a 'bug' reporting section of Thwack, where people can post their bugs, and people can vote that they can reproduce said bug, and provide meaningful data to allow the dev's to find and squish them!
In fact, I'm going to create said feature request, for Thwack itself, right now!
Whilst the tone of this FR is somewhat negative, let's see if we can make something constructive out of it! I'll post the link to the FR here, when I've created it
EDIT: As promised, here's the link to the FR:
Hi silverbacksays
That FR trying to signal to Solarwinds PM that All that glitters is not gold - Wikipedia
YES Solarwinds delivered big time with new features
BUT
There are many new features that are half baked that generate bugs.
There are too many old features that are not getting any work.
Solarwinds like to say that they take the input from thwack and the customers...
IF that is right?
so why they ignore more den 500 customers /vote
Please don't tell me that they can not count....
:-/
https://thwack.solarwinds.com/ideas/2254#start=25
Gonna have to completely disagree with you on Web Reports. I took a while to actually start using them as I was quite proficient with Report Writer, but once I started using Web Reports I wouldn't go back to Report Writer if you paid me. The ONLY thing that Report Writer can do right now that Web Reports can't is to allow a report you've written to show up in the web console. Other than that I can do every single thing that Report Writer can do in Web Reports and I can do it 10 times better and 10 times faster. Anybody dissing web reports probably hasn't spent much time learning them. They are incredibly good and far superior in every way to Report Writer. I mean seriously, as a Report Writer lover I can honestly say that this isn't even a close comparison...
Regarding the inability to use Web Reports in other parts of the console: I too would like this, however I also understand that doing it the way Report Writer used to work isn't even possible. A Web Report is more synonymous with a View, not a classic Report Writer report. Something more synonymous with Report Writer would be the Custom Table resource that was added when Web Reports came about.
What I really want to see and I truly hope they are working on is the ability to re-use custom objects (like Custom Tables, Custom Charts, Custom Query resources, etc...) throughout the product. This is actually possible and would fulfill the numerous (however misguided) requests to allow web reports to be planted on views.
The way I'd like to see it work would be if I build a Custom Table for a specific Web Report, I'd like to be able to use that same Custom Table in other Views and Reports throughout the web console. Currently you can only duplicate Custom Tables/Charts within the same report.
Even better would be the ability to re-use the actual custom Data Sources we use to build Custom Tables/Charts. It'd be really cool if we go to put a new Custom Table onto a View/Report and then pick a previously created custom Data Source to drive the new Custom Table/Chart we are building. It'd be even cooler if it worked like SAM Templates in that any changes made to the original Data Source automatically affected all of the Custom Tables/Charts we've built that use that same Data Source. That would be incredibly useful and would tie right in with the type of workflow that people are already used to with Orion since they use this type of "one-to-many relationship" feature not just in SAM Templates but also now with Alert Actions.
A lot of reason that SolarWinds hasn't been addressing some of the other issues you mention (and this is my theory mind you, I don't actually know this to be the case) is that they are still in the early phases of a complete UI refresh. They are moving the entire web console over to a completely new UI framework. This move doesn't just include the front-end "look and feel" of the web console, but actually includes the entire back end, which means Orion will be able to take advantage of newer web technologies like HTML 5 and other stuff that I don't know anything about but that I'm sure is really cool and, more importantly, much faster.
For example: People have been complaining about the Manage Nodes page forever. I myself couldn't figure out why they didn't just tweak some things to fulfill the numerous complaints. Well, the reason was that the time they would spend doing that would only push back the amazing new Manage Nodes page they'd been working on for so long. This new page solves so many complaints that people have had over the years and even adds in new features that I never even knew I wanted. The same thing can be said about their new Polling Engine Upgrade/Installer. It is sooooo good and fixes many gripes people have had over the years. Both of these things still need some tweaking, but they are already leaps and bounds beyond what the old versions offered.
Bottom line is that SolarWinds is a huge company with a TON of moving parts and a client base that is about as diverse as it comes. Furthermore, they aren't making a specialty product that fills a very specific role. Instead they are making an operational "all-in-one" monitoring and management tool that covers everything from deep storage and virtualization monitoring to application monitoring to network configuration management to network device monitoring to DHCP/DNS management to yada yada yada... everything. You can go buy any one specialty tool and it will probably beat SolarWinds in that specific area. However, SolarWinds isn't meant to necessarily replace specialty tools. In medium to large environments those specialty tools are still needed by the administrators of those areas. SolarWinds is geared towards giving a one-stop-shop to operational teams and administrators to give them an all-in-one place to see the status of the whole environment and to even perform some management functionality for certain things. There isn't another product out there with the all-in-one feature set that is as good as SolarWinds in my opinion. Paessler is OK and is definitely a competitor but I think they are still a long way off from coming close. Arguably a well built and managed Nagios environment could probably rival and maybe even beat SolarWinds, but the amount of expertise, experience, and time that would have to be spent to get a Nagios environment to that level and, even more importantly, to keep it at that level, is tremendous. Most companies won't dedicate the resources to finding and paying the person/people capable of doing this when something like SolarWinds is out there.
With such a large product that has so many diverse needs it takes a long time for changes to be implemented. Plus, no matter what they work on they are not going to please everyone and the time they spend working on something means they are not able to spend time working on the 10,000 other things other people want them to work on. They really can't win. However, they do a really good job in my opinion and I have been thoroughly impressed and pleased with the progress they've made and the direction they are going. Except with WPM. That product really needs some love. It's been a long time since it was upgraded. Seriously. A really LONG time...
