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Observation: General lack of testing environments

Hi,

As with many others on the forum I jump at the opportunity to upgrade to the latest Solarwinds installation and as long as I have backed up the necessary elements I am happy to continue on our production systems.

On this occassion I luckly I have not taken the plunge not because I expected failures but because I want to get the SQL database off the servers as they are at the moment as its killing the performance - before going ahead

What has occurred to me during reading all the issues and problems our peers are having with the new upgrade is that it seems that in general network monitoring does not seem to be high on the list for being afforded a testing or pre-deployment environment as you would expect from other business critical applications and services. (My organisation included)

Granted there are some obvious issues with having a replica pre-deployment enviroment such as cost for mirroring the system.

I think that possibly out of the perceived chaos of the recent and well intentioned upgrade it will provide the opportunity to add weight to a business case for ensuring that the resources are allocated to provide an appropriate testing enviroment.

:-)

Miron

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Accepted answers

All comments

jeremiahmcclain

It would be nice to be able to test, and not by having to install the demo each time a patch is released. Speaking from experience, I have had a number of issues with the upgrade to 9.5.

neilmborilla

+100%

It looks like the end-user or customer will do the test for them....

This statement might be harsh to them but it's a reality....

In my case, I haven't experienced smooth upgrade.

FormerMember

It looks like the end-user or customer will do the test for them....

Well, yes and no. We do lots of testing internally. But we have many many thousands of customers with a wide variety of environments, and our experience has been that no matter how much we test internally, we find new bugs when customers get the release.

We did a beta and a release candidate and found some bugs, but we not as many as we wanted to find.

So I'll note that most people have had good upgrades, but that many of the people with bad upgrades write about them on thwack, which is natural and great and why thwack exists, but it also leads to a slightly erroneous perception that the release is bumpier than it really is.

Nevertheless, the release was not as smooth as we wanted it to be. We are planning some changes to our process that will involve more people putting into production before we release it more generally. The goal is let people select themselves into the program. Those who want the code early and who are willing to take some bumps can do so. By the time we make it more widely available, it should be smoother.

kahlua

There is a big lack up understanding on the part of SW as far as licenses go. They will not issue a temporary license any more. They tell you to download the demo and do your testing there. Unfortunately the demo does not have the updated patches that you can install with the licensed version. You cannot install the patches to the demo to bring in the new fixes.

In my opinion it seems like SW doesn't care that these systems are critical in our environments and need to be tested out first.

I have always liked SW support but this process has been very frustrating.

Miron

All,

My intention in starting this post was not to offer any critism to SW as im not in a position to comment on the effectiveness of the upgrade as I haven't proceeded yet myself.

It was more to draw the attention to the fact that Network Monitoring as a service has grown out of just being a nice to have and only used by techies to a complementary infrastructure management and enabler of business decision making tool. I am assuming and only based on some comments and personal experience that the users of the tool now include people like service desk staff, CTO, CIO, estates personel over and above the traditional techies.

As such the business should become more willing to supply the resources for development enviroments and yes at the same time an appropriate pricing structure for a dev license would ensure greater take up.

Regards

Miron

neilmborilla

So I'll note that most people have had good upgrades, but that many of the people with bad upgrades write about them on thwack, which is natural and great and why thwack exists, but it also leads to a slightly erroneous perception that the release is bumpier than it really is.

Good thing about it is that SW staff is very responsive in dealing with customer's cases. From lowest rank to director

Its some sort of a relief when a customer's complaint are being addressed and not being ignored