NPM 12.0 Release Notes Link goes to old notes... (UDT and SAM too)

NOTE: The release notes links are stale as of the time I wrote this post at 11:15am (EST) on 6/8/2016. I received the Updates Available banner at 2am (EST).

I was excited to get the "3 Product Update(s) are Available" banner across the top of my Orion install today. I've really been impressed with the attention to the upgrade process that SolarWinds has displayed lately. However, a same-ole' problem has creeped up again and that is SolarWinds releasing a product and linking us to old Release Notes... That probably seems like a small issue when you look at the big picture, but it is a pretty big miss in my opinion. Any decent sized shop with strict change management procedures is not going to update a product when they don't know exactly what they are getting. Sure I can go digging around on Thwack and look at the dozens of blog posts and discussions as well as the Release Candidate notes and Beta notes to find this info, but I shouldn't have to and that still doesn't tell me definitively what the GA release contains.

I first clicked the UDT 3.2.4 Release Notes link and it took me to v3.2.3 notes from December of 2015. I then figured there was no way SAM and NPM will link to stale notes given all the attention they've put on the upgrade process. Nope. I was wrong. SAM links to 6.2.3 notes from December of 2015 and NPM links to a new Success Center page of release notes for 11.5.3.

Come on SolarWinds! So close to having a really good process here but you guys have to stop giving us exciting new product updates and linking us to old stale release notes so that we can go play "find-a-note" for the next 10 minutes. I'm sure you guys will update the notes links soon, but you should update the release notes at the exact same time the update is available. Even if this all gets fixed 5 minutes after this post, there really isn't any reason not to release the notes at the same time as the update for all future releases...

UPDATE, DAY 2: Still nothing has changed. "Release Notes" links in Orion "Product Updates Available" popup point to old notes. Still the "Product Updates Available" only offers me 3 product upgrades despite 5 or 6 brand new versions are available for upgrade. Meaning users are still manually having to hunt out information themselves instead of SolarWinds properly pointing them to it.

UPDATE: I just went into our Customer Portal to check there (previously I was clicking on the Release Notes links provided in the popup that appears in Orion when clicking on the nag banner link. See screenshot further below) and discovered the following for each module when clicking on the "Product Documentation" link on their Download pages:

NPM 12.0.0: The Product Documentation link takes me to the Success Center page for NPM. Clicking Release Notes there takes me to the updated Release Notes for 12.0.0, whereas the link in my screenshot further below still takes me to the old release notes.

SAM 6.2.4: The Product Documentation link takes me to the Success Center page for SAM. Clicking Release Notes there takes me to the updated Release Notes for 6.2.4, whereas the link in my screenshot further below still takes me to the old release notes.

NTA 4.2.4: (This update isn't showing up in our Orion "Product Updates Available" popup) - The Product Documentation link takes me to the old product documentation page for NTA (not the Success Center page) and the Release Notes link there takes me to the old 4.1.2 version notes.

NCM 7.5.0: (Also not showing up in our "Product Updates Available" popup despite being released now.) - The Product Documentation link takes me to the Success Center page for NCM and the Release Notes take me to the new Release Notes for 7.5.0. Success!

VMAN 6.3.2 (We do have VMAN integrated, but this still isn't showing up in "Product Updates Available") - The Product Documentation link takes me to the Success Center page for VMAN and the Release Notes take me to the new Release Notes for 6.3.2. Success!

VNQM 4.2.4: (Also not showing up in our "Product Updates Available" popup despite being released now.) - The Product Documentation link takes me to the old product documentation page for VNQM (not the Success Center page) and the Release Notes link there takes me to the old 4.2.3 version notes.

UDT 3.2.4.0: The Product Documentation link takes me to the Success Center page for UDT and the Release Notes take me to the new Release Notes for 3.2.4.0. Success!

Customer Portal Release Notes accuracy Summary: 5 out of 7 modules release on 6/7/2016 linked to the new version release notes.

Orion "Product Update(s) Available" Summary: 0 out of 3 modules listed linked to the new version release notes. Only 3 out of 7 modules released on 6/7/2016 show up in the "Product Updates Available" popup in Orion (UDT, SAM, and NPM. Missing are NTA, NCM, VMAN, and VNQM).

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orioncrack

Well despite this and a few others, it sure beats using Nagios though.

xtraspecialj

Well, yeah... But that isn't really relative to this post I think. I know you jest and I am smiling, but I think this is a pretty easy fix for them. Look how much they have improved the update process and communication. They just missed this bit, that's all. They just need to get the team that does Release Notes integrated with the team that pushes the releases and make sure they are synced up. Basically, if the release notes are not ready the product update doesn't get pushed. Period. When the release notes are ready they update ALL links pointing to them and make sure they point to the new location. It just takes a bit of focus which can be a tough thing in a large company, but it can and absolutely should be done going forward.

orioncrack

I call them out on oversights too. The Appinsight SQL PDF had a handful of bogus info that amazes me no one else noticed and they corrected it.

It goes to show that companies are imperfect whether it be examples such as this or grammatical or spelling errors on their web site or within documentation.

Perfection is always sought but never achieved.

Quality control is difficult in the Facebook/Instagram generation. No one is focused on quality in many aspects of American life. We're too obsessed with what other people are cooking, eating, voting for, 7 second humor videos, and pucker kissy face selfies.

Nation of idiots we are becoming for the most part.

And again, thank god you have budget for SolarWinds because after playing with Nagios yesterday I'm happier with SolarWinds even at the outrageous yearly pricing. Even though SCOM is still better than SAM by miles.

GZhytar

Thanks for letting us know, xtraspecialj I'll work with the team to ensure this unfortunate mistake is being handled and improved. On behalf of SolarWinds team, I'd ask you to share your further findings & thoughts on NPM 12.

xtraspecialj

Good insights cracky. And yes, Nagios is relatively bad compared with something like Orion, but they really are very different even though they are direct competitors and serve virtually the same purpose. Nagios is good if you have a very knowledgeable engineer running it and he/she can dedicate their time to it. It's got tons of flexibility and you can almost quite literally design your own features as you go. The downside is that you pretty much have to have a dedicated and knowledgeable person(s) to make it work well, whereas with something like Orion you can have an almost complete newbie working on it only part of his/her time and still get useful results. An even bigger plus to Orion in my opinion is that if you do have (a) very knowledgeable engineer(s) they can really dig deep and create/copy a lot of customization's to tailor it to their needs, plus the Thwack community is a big selling feature despite the lack of good navigational and search features on this Jive-based website. I like to say to my co-workers that Thwack is a great website despite itself.

xtraspecialj

Thank you for your reply GZhytar.

We are just now getting a dev environment stood up so that we can test the new version fully before deploying it in Prod. We were one of the many customers who did not have a good upgrade experience during the NPM 11.5 upgrade fiasco and are quite gun-shy when it comes to another big upgrade. I have had a beta server with various versions of NPM12/SAM6.4 including the latest Release Candidate running for a while, so I'm a little familiar with it.

Probably more than what you are looking for, but here you go:

I haven't had time to dig deep but one of my absolute favorite new features is one that you guys aren't really talking about much, and I think for anyone knowledgeable with NPM Alerts it is a MASSIVELY big deal:

The new ability to assign alert actions to multiple alerts AND have any future changes to the action automatically reflected in all of the alerts the action was assigned to (kind of like the relationship of SAM Templates to Assigned Application Monitors) is such a great thing that it overshadows a lot of the other new features to me.

We have been getting ready to redo our alert system (we have over 200 alerts and there is a lot of overlap/duplicates as well as alerts sent to individuals who either no longer work here, or no longer work in the same role), but when I found out this feature was coming out a couple of months ago we put a hold on that until NPM 12 launched so we could design them using this new feature. This will not only save us time while creating and deploying these new alerts and the standardized actions we plan to create, but it will be an incredible time-saver when it comes to administering these alerts in the future.

I'm also stoked about the drop-down menus, NetPath, automated discovery (although for automated discovery to truly be useful the import rule feature needs to be greatly improved. We are too limited when it comes to filtering Interfaces and especially volumes that you often have to have multiple import rules (which means multiple discoveries against the same sets of nodes unless you want to keep manually editing the rules on each discovery run) to insure you are getting the interfaces you want and none of the ones you don't. With volumes it is so limited that you pretty much have to just let it import everything (except for Removable drives, CD-Drives, and Floppy's of course) and then go through and delete the ones you didn't want via a SQL DELETE query.

I am quite disappointed though that Manage Nodes and many of the other older administrative tables (and even some newer tables like when assigning polling packages in Manage Pollers) didn't get fixed/improved:

By fixed I mean that "Volumes" need to be added as a drop-down feature just like Interfaces are to Manage Nodes. For instance, the recent ability to individually set utilization thresholds per Volume is useless in all but the smallest environments since there is no effective way to bulk manage those thresholds I still use custom properties for volume thresholdss since the Custom Property Editor table has amazing sorting, filtering, searching, and grouping capabilities other than the really weird inability to add Node properties into the mix. Since Volumes and Nodes have direct relationships in SWIS this should be a no brainer...

Also, this never bothered me until a co-worker pointed it out, but they need to fix the fact that when managing interfaces with Manage Nodes you can't group by Interface properties (same thing if they add volumes to the Manage Nodes drop-down) and the only Interface properties you can add as a column are Interface Custom Properties. Now that I've noticed this it drives me insane and makes me wonder how it hasn't been fixed years ago...

By "Improve" Manage Nodes (and really every administrative table throughout ALL Orion modules) I mean they should all use the exact same format as the Custom Property Editor's table (but with the added feature of being able to add properties they have SWIS relationships with as mentioned previously). I should be able to search, sort, filter, and/or group-by any property and be able to do all of these things at the same time like in the CP Editor. That is a huge thing that any business with more than a hundred nodes/interfaces/volumes needs, even if they don't know they need it.

RichardLetts

xtraspecialj wrote:
Also, this never bothered me until a co-worker pointed it out, but they need to fix the fact that when managing interfaces with Manage Nodes you can't group by Interface properties (same thing if they add volumes to the Manage Nodes drop-down) and the only Interface properties you can add as a column are Interface Custom Properties. Now that I've noticed this it drives me insane and makes me wonder how it hasn't been fixed years ago...

Oddly enough it will be three years later this year since I asked for this:

it needs more votes :-)

meech

ALWAYS tell us what we miss, that is how we know what to fix!