Another messed up feature.

riggst

We have been using the "User defined links" feature to access various websites for troubleshooting or informational purposes since version 7.8.  I personally have come to rely on this features for many uses.  But now with 8.5 it doesn't work properly anymore.  When I edit it to add the websites I want to access everything appears fine, but when I access from the web page I find that the address line has http://orionms/Orion/ followed by the www.whatever website I am trying to access.  This is not a major problem but it is a huge annoyance since I have come to rely on this feature.  I cannot find where this line is added to to the address line and would appreciate it very much if someone could tell me where to look.

 Like many others have expressed on this site, I truly disappointed with the new version of Orion.  It appears to have very poorly tested and in my opinion should never have been released with so many bugs and programming mistakes in it.  If the programmers in my company had released with this many problems they would have been fired.  This years maintenance charges were double what they were last year.  The support appears to be half or less than what we were able to receive before.  I can understand some issues coming with almost any upgrade, but this series of upgrades and, hot fixes etc. is truly unacceptable.

 I have been able to fix or work around numerous problems by using this forum and appreciate all the imput from the user communit and the Solarwinds support team.  I just truly feel there should never have been as many issues as there have been.  When the next upgrade comes out I will be waiting quite awhile before performing the upgrade to wait to see what everyone has to say about it and how well it works.  I have spent way too much time working through problems and too little time using the program for its intended purpose.  I now have it running at 98% of what I expect it to be and believe most of the issues are behind me but this was NOT fun.  I truly hope things improve from here on in, or I will be forced to look elsewhere for my network monitoring needs.

Tom Riggs

Diebold, Inc.

FormerMember

 Tom,

 I'm sorry to hear that you had a tough time with the upgrade.  Although we labeled in 8.5, this release of Orion was actually a major architectural change to the website.  It had to be done in order to move forward with a lot of outstanding customer requests; the technology had us stuck.

As for the quality issue, I'll say what I've said before:  We tested 8.5 extensively, and we had several dozen beta testers.  Where we fell short was in terms of testing upgrades in the real world.  Our beta testers mostly ran parallel systems with fresh installs.  They did not beta test the upgrades as much as we would have liked.  So we missed issues related to those upgrades.  Our bad.  In order to avoid that problem in the future, we plan to make several changes to the beta program, mostly around encouraging beta testers to focus on upgrade scenarios.  Second, we plan to introduce a release candidate phase where we make the RC available to all existing customers to bang on for a few weeks before we go GA.  The next release will have a lot of new features, but it will not be such a major architectural change.  That fact, combined with the new customer-testing processes should result in a smoother experience for everyone.

Again, on behalf of the product team, our apologies for the bumpiness of the process. 

 
Sincerely,

Denny