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Pro Tip: Don't uninstall OrionCore

I had called SolarWinds support to take a look at very high CPU usage after upgrading to NPM 12.0.1 RC2.

After remoting into my polling engine, the tech noticed that the collector service was using way more CPU than normal. His solution was to uninstall both collector services from the installer folder and then uninstall the Core service.

BAD IDEA

He couldn't figure out how to fix it and started to place the blame on random things. Such as I have my SQL DB installed on the same server as my polling engine (I don't), I installed an RC in a production environment (RC versions are fully supported), and that the Core service got corrupted (I watched him uninstall it).

I hate to bad talk SolarWinds support as my many calls to them have been hands down the best experience I've EVER had with any company's support staff. This is the first time I've had a bad experience and it's not just bad but, horrible.

I'm awaiting a call back from an application engineer to resolve the issue and in the meantime, I'm working with my server team to restore the latest VM snapshot.

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RichardLetts

You should just be able to re-install it.

I believe the installers for the components are all located at : C:\ProgramData\Solarwinds\Installers

I think if you run the main NPM installer it'd upgrade/replace your orioncore

anyway... when I ran VM servers I'd always take a snapshot before letting support folks mess with a server so I could revert it myself.

josh.haberman

The tech ran into numerous errors when trying to reinstall with the individual installer from the installers directory. He also tried to run the main install but, that failed as well.

I did end up having the latest snapshot restored and was able to resolve the CPU issue as well.

I guess the purpose of this post was more so to vent on rare really bad customer service by SolarWinds support.

jxchappell

Was it the SolarwindsInformationServiceV3?

We had a similar issue and I unwittingly fixed it because the NTA service on the NTA database host kept crashing...when I moved my NTA database to a new host and reconfigured/reinstalled NTA on the main poller, that service stopped building up memory and the service never crashed on the new DB host...the relation I put to this was that something on the main poller (InformationSertviceV3) had some kind of conflict, Im thinking a memory leak, with the NTA service on my NTA database server...not too bad of a fix, but I came up with it myself

Support wanted me to re-install the InformationServiceV3, multiple times now, but I don't think that is the exact issue

I am always very leary of uninstalling and re-installing...by that point the server is already "dirty" I would just rather install a fresh copy on a new VM and move on

I think having some standby VMs is good practice with this application especially after an upgrade

chadsikorra

Sad to say that I've had similar experiences when calling into support with a CPU issue on the main poller. However, we had no issues reinstalling using the installers in "C:\ProgramData\Solarwinds\Installers". Worse yet they never could figure out the issue with CPU spiking on the data collector even after the ticket was escalated and open for quite a while. The issue still surfaces sometimes after a reboot. I plan on rebuilding the main poller once SAM 6.3 is out.

orioncrack

Well at least you aren't using Nagios and can dismiss one bad experience with support.

My past few tickets seemed like they were rushed and had no personal tone. It seemed like the engineer probably had like 100 tickets in his queue and was speeding along just offering suggestions without any personal attention.

I think Orion is a somewhat fragmented piece of software with so many moving pieces and parts that their top tier support staff is most likely overwhelmed by deep, deep issues with a customer's broken system or upgrade failures that take hours and not minutes to resolve.

Also, tickets I open with an obvious defect or bug they get closed without any kind of "we're going to fix this" acknowledgement on Thwack, a KB article or in the ticket closure notes.

rschroeder

Ah, but think of how much better educated that person will be, now that they've uninstalled the core and broken everything! What a great opportunity they were able to participate in!

I hope they thanked you for the learning experience, and apologized for the extended outage.

Competence doesn't get my goat, but the opposite . . . When all you have to do is just one thing--like not uninstall a core service from everything--I don't know

RichardLetts

orioncrack wrote:
Also, tickets I open with an obvious defect or bug they get closed without any kind of "we're going to fix this" acknowledgement on Thwack, a KB article or in the ticket closure notes.

This I do find annoying. I often report bugs that I can work around. I don't see why fixing bugs has to be filed as an enhancement required, posted on Thwack to get votes, or other stuff.

All i need to know is that a bug report has been filed, that it as a reference number i can find in release notes, and confidence that a developer might look at this.

RichardLetts

aside: I've had a bug that was resolved by re-installing the OrionCore service.

[if you uninstall IPAM it removes some of the orioncore files, breaking your core install for some widgets that make use of them]

I would give you the bug number, but I didn't get one...