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APM full of problems

I have installed APM 2 weeks ago and have had nothing but problems with this feature.

Original install did not function and gave so many headaches that my entire Orion suite needed to be re-installed after rebuilding my entire server.

First off upon APM not working it messed up the Original Application Monitor (AM) in which support told me I had uninstall and re-install APM which I did several times and somewhere in doing this it removed the change uninstall for AM and I was no longer able to remove or re-install this. This some how corrupted teh Window installer to which I could not just remove and re-install Sp2 for Windows 2003 since the Windows installer was not working.

This caused me to have to repair my Windows 2003 server and then re-install Orion and run all service packs.

Today I had another error with APM in which it could not connect to the APM service engine in which I had to re-run the orion configuration wizard.

The application templates are useless in APM since they need to be rebuilt to conform to each business' way as in how the applications are setup so they may as well not even be included. I would prefer a better gui or be able to use the network performance monitor like the older version AM was where you right clicked on server and then were able to choose which services or applications you wanted to monitor per server then the current template deal that is in APM.

I am still trying to figure this whole thing out but I would suggest everyone stay away from this version until they have it working better then it's current form since what you get is nothing but headaches and no better application monitoring then the AM version. I don't see any improvements other then templates that are pretty useless.

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FormerMember

Profzoom1,

I'm sorry your experience has not been good. I've looked into your case, and at least some of the issues you are experiencing seem to be specific to your environment. We've had hundreds of other customers install APM without any issue.

APM includes WMI monitoring of processes and services, a variety of network service and port monitors, and user experience monitoring of web sites, none of which were included in the old AM. Of course, those features may not be valuable to you, which would explain your assessment.

Folks who follow Thwack will know that I'm not particularly defensive about the products. Orion's users are engineers and engineers look at the everything and see how it might be improved, which is great, although it tends to leave us disappointed with the current state of affairs. So people criticize, and I try to acknowledge. In that context and without being reflexively defensive, I don't think think your comments are representative of most users' experience with APM.

That said, I respect your decision to hate this version and stick with AM until the next one comes out. We (the product team) will take it as a challenge to make the next version irresistible to even the toughest critics.

Cheers,

Denny

wumpheno

Denny,

I would agree with Profzoom1 that there is a fundamental problem currently with APM module staying up long enough to get good data out of it. There is a know .net issue with APM where the windows application logs is filled with errors from the .Net 2.0 which in turn make the orion job module fail and doesnt clear until a reboot is done and then only comes back after a short period of time. I have been running orion since 2005 and ver 1 of application monitor before I loaded the new 2.0 version with sp3 loaded. After speaking with support at solarwinds many times about this issue and have the reloading of .net services I can safely say there is a problem. Worst of all I was told after the troubleshooting session over 3 week period that this issue has been identified as an issue with APM and will be resolved in SP4 (another 2 weeks at minimum away). When speaking with my account team at Solarwinds the PM gave us the fixes that were included in the 4.0 fix and this issue wasnt even listed. I am not trying to troll on this thread I am simply encouraging Solarwinds to be upfront about the problems it's userbase faces and be treated like intelligent users to get issues resolved.

FormerMember

After speaking with support at solarwinds many times about this issue and have the reloading of .net services I can safely say there is a problem. Worst of all I was told after the troubleshooting session over 3 week period that this issue has been identified as an issue with APM and will be resolved in SP4 (another 2 weeks at minimum away). When speaking with my account team at Solarwinds the PM gave us the fixes that were included in the 4.0 fix and this issue wasnt even listed.

William, I am the PM for APM, and I got a request from your Sales rep about what's fixed in SP4, but I had no context, so I simply sent him the last version of the ReadMe. Your issue will be fixed in SP4, I think the problem is that you did not recognize your problem in the ReadMe. I assume you were looking for something that referrred to .Net Framework or "orion job module", since that is how you describe yoru problem. Your issue is fixed in the bug described as, "The SolarWinds Orion Job Engine service can crash and prevent the service from restarting correctly."

I apologize for the weak communication, but it's certainly not an attempt to mislead or obfuscate. We try to be as transparent as possible, but we sometimes fall short of our goal.

Ralphr

Not looking to pile on but would like some clarification. I have been working with SW Tech Support since May 20th on an issue where .net errors are causing the SW Job Scheduler to crash then it auto restarts and then the .net error occurs again causing this process to repeat until I shut down and restart all services. Is this the issue that is addressed in SP4 ??? If so when is SP4 due for release ?? When was this identified as a bug with APM ??

rcahill

I have installed APM 2 weeks ago and have had nothing but problems with this feature.

After 6 weeks with APM SP3 installed the same "unknown" has started to come up.

Both Windows Services and Orion Service Manager has Job Scheduler started. Eventually the services stop with the following in the application log.

EventType clr20r3, P1 solarwinds.schedulerservice.exe, P2 1.0.0.75, P3 4785ad81, P4 mscorlib, P5 2.0.0.0, P6 461eee3d, P7 407b, P8 a3, P9 system.invalidoperationexception, P10 NIL.

Windows identifies the EventID as 5000

Both .net 2 and .net 3 are installed.

Additionally the System Event Manager Event ID 7031 displays the following (note the 926).

The SolarWinds Orion Job Scheduler service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 926 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 60000 milliseconds: Restart the service.

Ralphr

Is there an ETA for the release of APM service pack 4 ?