Current open issues in NPM 9.5?

pserwe

I'm looking to find a list of issues known to SW currently open for NPM 9.5.

 

On a related note, I'd like SW from an organizational level provide, or at least make very easy to locate the following information:

 

1)  New service packs available - should be emailed out if a customer is subscribed.

2)  List of bugs fixed in current service pack, as well as bugs still open.

3)  A very up to date list of known issues with the latest release, and an estimate (not a cast-in-stone commitment) of when a service pack will be out to fix those issues.

4)  A guideline for release cycle adoption timelines.  I.E.:  If NPM is critical and your organization requires 99.999% uptime, we recommend you wait at least 30/60/90 days after the new version is released before upgrading in a critical environment.  For enterprise customers, we recommend you wait at least 15/30/45 days.  While I realize this may slow the adoption and bug finding cycle, there will always be customers who don't mind being on the bleeding edge.  Finding this stuff out via off-hand comments from tech support is far less than ideal, and not being able to find specifics documented anywhere is also pretty challenging.

To me, it makes the most sense organizationally, for SW to provide this both on the thwack forums, and in an email to people who subscribe to this sort of information.  If you were to look at the information provided by Cisco (for instance) on their software updates, you kind of get the idea.  While I'm not suggesting you either have or should dedicate the amount of resources Cisco does to software development and customer information, it would be nice to see an effort.

Peter

FormerMember

1)  New service packs available - should be emailed out if a customer is subscribed.

We are looking at how to provide updates within the products.  In the meantime, we post every release and SP to the SolarWinds Announcements Forum.  You can either subscribe to that forum via email, and you'll get notified, or you can use the RSS feed for that forum.

2)  List of bugs fixed in current service pack, as well as bugs still open.

We provide a list of bugs fixed in the ReadMe for every SP

 

3)  A very up to date list of known issues with the latest release, and an estimate (not a cast-in-stone commitment) of when a service pack will be out to fix those issues.

We try to provide responses to what's coming up, but we are fixing things very much in real-time right after a release, so there are limits on how much we can provide and still maintain any kind of speed in getting out SPs. I'm not saying we won't do it, but I am pointing out that there is a cost.  We'll take it under consideration.

 

4)  A guideline for release cycle adoption timelines.  I.E.:  If NPM is critical and your organization requires 99.999% uptime, we recommend you wait at least 30/60/90 days after the new version is released before upgrading in a critical environment.  For enterprise customers, we recommend you wait at least 15/30/45 days.  While I realize this may slow the adoption and bug finding cycle, there will always be customers who don't mind being on the bleeding edge.  Finding this stuff out via off-hand comments from tech support is far less than ideal, and not being able to find specifics documented anywhere is also pretty challenging.

I'll confer with the rest of the team to see what we can do in the way of an official statement.  What I can recommend less formally is that for NPM releases, if you want to be biased in favor of avoiding the annoying gotchas right after a release, then you should wait until we deliver an SP 2.