A few helpful tips and pointers to be aware of, before upgrading to NCM 7

We wanted to let you know about a few instances of problems that upgrading customers have encountered recently.

Hopefully, this will explain a few things and make your NCM 7 upgrade smoother.

NCM 7.0 Win32 unable to launch with message "Unable to retrieve license”

· Error may mean that NCM win32 can't retrieve the license from Core and is not necessarily an issue with the license key itself.

· Verify that NCM and Core config wizards have been run successfully (on both machines if NPM is on second server).

o If not, run them again.

o We have noticed that several users cancelled the Config Wizard either because they were surprised by the fact that an Orion database was created (it is normal), or because they did not have the credentials of the database server that will allow for the creation of the Orion DB.

o As recommended by the pre-installer steps, make sure you have these DB credentials before starting the upgrade.

o Canceling the Config Wizard at that point, will leave you with an incomplete install/upgrade and will create this problem. Running the Config Wizard again should fix this problem.

· The NCM license needs to be activated on the NPM/Core server and not the NCM machine, in the case of a 2 machine deployment scenario (NPM and NCM separate)

o For more, read the section "Licensing Orion NCM" in the Release Notes

o Failing to do this, will activate your NCM 7 in evaluation mode.

o If you are in this situation, you can de-activate your license and re-activate it on the proper machine (the Orion/NPM machine)

First time Node Synchronization issues an error: "Synchronization error: Invoke failed, check fault information"

· If you encounter this error message, restart your Server or All Orion services and try to resync

· Also, try running Solarwinds/Orion/OrionPermissionChecker.exe and try to resync

Watch the installation/upgrade video that match your deployment scenario.

· They are linked from the initial Pre-Installer screen of NCM 7.0

· You can also access them from here.

More helpful KB's

· http://knowledgebase.solarwinds.com/kb/questions/3420/NCM+Scheduled+Jobs+Missing+after+Upgrade

· http://knowledgebase.solarwinds.com/kb/questions/3419/Upgrading+Real-time+Config+Change+Detection+in+NCM+7.0

· http://knowledgebase.solarwinds.com/kb/questions/3418/Custom+Properties+Absent,+NCM+Showing+Errors+Instead

If you are experiencing the "NCM Accounts Migration Warning"

· You can find more information here.

When you install NCM 7 standalone on the same server as Orion/NPM, are they always integrated?

· Yes, the NCM Web UI installed on an NPM server will look as a Configs Tab in the Orion environment

· However, if you want some users to not have this Configs tab, you can configure your Orion environment as follows:

o Step 1: Go to Setting->Manage Accounts

o Step 2: Select the desired account and press Edit

o Step 3: Set the “ConfigsTab Menu Bar” to “none”

o Step 4: Submit and verify that the Configs Tab has disappeared for this user account

Good posting from mdiotte in this thread, about Custom properties

· And how they are now being treated, in NCM 7, due to the convergence of the nodes between Orion: here.

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smartd

Francois,
I've got the "Invoke failed" error.

My NPM install is a SLX, while my NCM is 1000 node. That worked fine in the previous release, but there may issues with the way 7.0 works?

What I hope is does is pull nodes from NCM over to NPM. If it works the other way around (and there is not filters for the sync), I'll need the instructions on how to remove NCM from the NPM, and load it standalone (which is frustrating).

Suggestions?

mdiotte

smartd,

I can confirm that it only sync nodes one way, NCM - > NPM/Orion Core. The node counts are additive so that if you had a NPM 100 and a NCM 100 you would end up having 200 Orion Core nodes available and 100 NCM nodes. The concept is you need an Orion Core node for every NCM node but not the other way around. You can then choose which Orion NPM/Core nodes are licensed as NCM nodes via the Manage NCM nodes page.

Have you tried the suggestions mentioned above to solve the sync issue? If they do not work I would suggest a support ticket as we will need to take a look at your diagnostics to determine the cause of the failure.

Hope this helps!

timf

I am going to add another gotcha to the list that I ran into. I have custom fields for both NCM and NPM. For example, I added a field for Country. In NPM, field was set to only allow 2 characters in database. I didn't have this limitation in NCM. The 1st time node-sync failed miserably because it was trying to import custom fields that had entire country names into this 2 character limitation field. Makes sense as to why it bombed out.

So in summary, make sure your custom property fields match up before running that node sync.