Upgrading NTA, 4.2.2 to Recent

Question

Now that NPM is supporting 2012R2 I'm looking at getting all the modules upgraded. Current setup is two separate installs of NPM. Install one is NPM100 w/ NTA used for billing and install two is NPMslx for monitoring/alerting, no NTA and a secondary poller. Both instances of NPM use the same 2012 SQL DB on a third server and then with the older version of NTA it has a standalone server with the netflow DB, pre SQL. A total of five servers.

I think I'm making too big of a deal about this, but with the requirement for the netflow DB to go SQL 2016 or later I feel like I have options on how I want to proceed.

1) Should I just install SQL 2016 on the existing netflow db server and when I upgrade NTA have it point there for netflow

2) Can SQL just for the netflow be installed on the same server as NPM/NTA. NPM data remains on the 2012 SQL DB

3) Is this an opportune time to move NPM and netflow DB to its own 2016 SQL db instance.

Keeping historical data is a nice to have, but we get the monthly billing reports sent via PDF. This seems like a project I would need to embark on at the beginning of the month though in order to gather enough data to base the 95th% billing on.

sreenathmp · Answer

I would recommend to first upgrade your NPM & NTA to newer version and then migrate the DB. As NPM 2020.2 supports both Win 2012 and SQL 2012 you can upgrade to that version. You may not have that flexibility with earlier versions of Solarwinds.

I also gone through the same situation for one of our customer and got it upgraded and then migrated 2 weeks before.

kendali · Answer

If I take the existing NPM100 DB from a 2012 SQL install and migrate it to a 2019 SQL install, could there be issues with that transition before completing the NPM/NTA upgrade? Drawing this out I think I'd like to go for the option to move my NPM/NTA install to its own SQL DB for both NPM and flowstore. Then that leaves my NPMslx/additional poller alerting environment on its own SQL DB server.

sreenathmp · Answer

While you upgrade NTA 2020.2 it will ask you to provide the details of DB serer where you can provide the new NTA DB details. In a production environment its not recommended to have both application and DB in same server. Its wise to upgrade your NPM DB also to SQL 2016 or 2019. Also upgrade your polling engine servers also to Win 2016 or 2019. Once you upgrade your NTA to 2020.2 you wont be able to access the historical data as old NTA is having a different DB.