Release Candidates are fully supported early releases of our products and can be installed in production environments. If you own NCM covered by current maintenance, you can download the installation packages from customer portal. Should you have any questions or comments, do not hesitate to reply to this post or send me e-mail directly.
Better Scalability and Performance
- One of the most important enhancements this release contains is support for additional polling engines (APE). By deploying APEs one NCM installation can typically handle about 30,000 devices. If you already have APEs for other SolarWinds products (e.g. NPM), you can leverage them for NCM, too.
- Not only scalability but also performance has been improved in this version; especially customers with large installations should notice better performance of inventory and Web UI. Example: if you click on a drill-down chart on the NCM Summary page, you can see that the details are now organized in a table that supports paging, which performs well with long lists of devices:
Improved Database Maintenance
Database purge and cleanup activities have been improved to avoid performance degradation over time, due to clogging of the database and disk directories with downloaded configurations.
NCM Settings in Web UI
We have made some progress with migrating funcionality from Win32 to Web UI. For example, the Settings page is now accessible through Web, which is another step in eliminating the need for NCM users to have access to the NCM server, i.e. better support for corporate user policies:
Configuration Download and Upload for MikroTik, Alaxala, and Apresia
All of these devices are now supported natively. Alaxala and Apresia are especially popular in Japanese market.
New Juniper Inventory Report
With this report it is much easier to inventory your Juniper devices:
In order to make the report work, be sure that it is enabled in the Node Inventory Settings:
Wizard for Real Time Change Detection
This feature is now easier to configure as there is a small wizard available in NCM settings:
Config Change Templates Enhancements for ACL Manipulation
The scripting language of Config Change Templates has been extended with a few string manipulation functions. These enhancements are particularly useful for IP address manipulation in access control lists:
