BEWARE the latest upgrade gotchas

Question

I just went to perform the latest upgrade and cannot upgrade NPM, SAM, NCM and NTA as IPAM 4.3.1 is installed and installer is now blocking upgrades of all our other PAID FOR products.
We decided IPAM maintenance costs were exceptionally high and not justified so we discontinued it after 4.3.1. This now means we cannot upgrade all the other products that we paid for and subsequently our investment in Solarwinds looks like a lemon.

How can we resolve this.
1. can we take IPAM off Solarwinds and host it on it's own server keeping it at 4.3.1?
2. should we dump this IPAM altogether and replace with another product?   What do others use instead of Solarwinds IPAM?
3. is there an installer switch which can override this check?
4. is there a way to fool the installer that 4.3.2 is installed and bypass the check - amend the version in an SQL table?
What are the dependencies between IPAM and the rest of our Solarwinds products? As far as I'm concerned is it a isolated product which should not need to interact with our other products.  I experimented before with moving it to another machine - got a few slightly minor faults (I think that was to do with reports) but it worked.  I didn't want to decouple this unless I had to - and had no problems back on 13th July when I upgraded. In my pre-checks I did see that the upgrade advisor showed it as incompatible and needed to be upgraded first, but nothing in the 12.0.1 NPM release notes.  I had assumed it would simply issue a warning - but it blocked everything - it's impossible to upgrade.   We definitely will not pay for maintenance on this product - it was over £2,500 pa (IPX version) - but for what?  I have a real problem at present because Solarwinds technical support is so poor - most of my calls take days before they start getting looked at, I get little to no feedback on long-term tickets, I've been massively invoncienienced by the bugs in the last version (below), and apart from paying for upgrades/development I'm not feeling I actually get any support from technical support.  It's not a rant, it's a fact.  Lots of companies have terrible customer support, big companies, and a few have exceptionally good.  I need this product to work flawlessly - I don't have time to spend loads of my time trying to make it work and constantly upgrading to fix the last set of bugs.  This is a good product, perhaps a great product, but it has lots of rough edges - and now if I have to de-link IPAM to get the rest upgraded I face irritation from the network team, the cost of another server and license, and all my effort moving it.
Our product set is;Orion Platform 2016.1.5300, NCM 7.5, IPAM 4.3.1, IVIM 2.1.2, NetPath 1.0, DPA 10.0.1, NPM 12.0, QoE 2.1.0, SAM 6.2.4, NTA 4.2.0

I have set aside time today (Sunday) for this upgrade, to fix all the faults introduced with the previous upgrade, particularly lack of TLS support, which has caused many tens of thousands of alerts, and for which I had an open ticket (1001037) since 14th July.   I closed that in anticipation that by the end of Sunday it would be fixed, but now that ticket will have to be re-opened as unresolved.

rschroeder · Answer

Sadness.  Always read the Product Upgrade Advisor and follow it exactly.

When an app is too expensive for your needs, and you stop buying its support, it's understandable that other things that are designed to tie together won't allow you to proceed as you imagined/hoped.  As others said above, you'll need to remove it from your SW group's solution, run it stand-alone elsewhere, or buy support for it, or replace it.

I'd be OK with SW offering one-offs for support, maybe credit-card-based on a per-call or per-instance issue.  But I can understand them not going that way for long-term support contracts for a product, in the interests of good business processes and maintaining or improving support offerings.  We're already all complaining that SW Support isn't responding as we'd expect.  Removing payments to them for products you rely on seems to possibly exacerbate that issue.

yaquaholic · Answer

You could split IPAM off your Orion platform to its own server (uninstall, reinstall on a separate server and point to existing DB instance), if you have a separate IPAM DB instance from the rest of your SolarWinds DBs.

If it is a common Orion DB, you may need to just start again (export everything from old IPAM, import into new IPAM), or go through the pain of migrating the IPAM_ DB tables to the new IPAM servers DB.

This post might help - IPAM Export and Import (migration to new server)

Then then you could upgrade Orion to 2016.2.

thedoclady · Answer

Hi jonathanswift​!

Unfortunately IPAM 4.3.1 is not supported on SAM 6.3, NPM 12.0.1, NCM 7.5.1, NTA 4.2.1. These latest product versions require IPAM 4.3.2 that was released in June 2016. It's not so much a gotcha, but more a compatibility requirement.

When planning the upgrade path working with the Product Upgrade Advisor, it should provide that info. If the advisor gave you trouble, let me know!

I can't answer how to get around it without losing the awesomeness of IPAM. Far as I know, you'll need to upgrade IPAM to 4.3.2 prior to upgrading to SAM 6.3, NPM 12.0.1, NCM 7.5.1, NTA 4.2.1.