FYI - Hope it can help someone
Upgraded an Orion installation today from SAM 6.5 and Orion 2017.? to SAM 6.7 and Orion 2018.2 HF6 with a local SQL Express 2016 SP1
Upgrade went fine but after Config wizard we saw that the server "Orion Module Engine" kept on restarting and menus etc was missing from web GUI.
Windows eventlog and the Solarwinds.Net log showed several posts of:
"
Service was unable to open new database connection when requested.
SqlException: A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)
Connection string - Data Source=localhost\sqlexpress;Initial Catalog=SolarWindsOrion;Persist Security Info=False;User ID=SolarWindsOrionUser;Password=*******;Max Pool Size=1000;Connect Timeout=20;Load Balance Timeout=120;Packet Size=4096;Application Name=SolarWinds.BusinessLayerHost@SolarWinds.BusinessLayerHost.exe;Workstation ID=SOLARWINDS
"
Checking the SQL Log we saw several posts like this:
"
Server local connection provider has stopped listening on [ \\.\pipe\SQLLocal\SQLEXPRESS ] due to a failure. Error: 0xe8, state: 4. The server will automatically attempt to re-establish listening.
Message Error: 26050, Severity: 17, State: 1.
"
The solution here was to update the SQL server, we installed SP2 for SQL. After the SQL SP2 update Orion worked fine again and no errors in any log.
