Experiences and Problems after upgrading to 7.8

Grabowski

I have just upgraded our Orion SLX from 7.4 to 7.8.2, to take advantage of the Wireless and Application Monitor Management packs. We also upgraded the Web engine from 7.6 to 7.8. The upgrade itself was very easy, but we are having some problems now.

1: The System Manager takes noticeably longer to launch.
2: It is no longer possible to "Publish to Remote Webserver" from Mapmaker without getting an error saying something to the effect of "Permission denied copying file"
3: Reports filters are no longer working on the website

On 1: It looks like et doesn't populate interfaces, volumes and so on until the time where you actually clik the "+" to expand the tree. I didn't notice if this was also the case immediately after the upgrade before we added the management packs, but maybe some of you have noticed this as well?

On 2: We tried EVERYTHING we can think of including sharing EVERYTHING on the webserver with ANYBODY, but the same error keeps popping up. We still have the old Remote Web Server in production on another platform in paralel, but publishing to that one is done without any form of problems. The mapmaker server can definitely see the new web-server in Windows. We have tried with global domain admin accounts. We have tried publishing straigth into the MAPS folder, but no luck. The only difference between the new and old web-server is that the old one is installed on a C:\ drive and the new one is on a \ drive. Does anyone know the mapmaker established if the web-engine is actually there to receive the published maps? Solarwinds helpdesk has turned this over to their developers now, but if you have seen anything like this I'd like to hear from you.

On 3: On our web-sites (one per country we operate in) generated by the additional (remote) web-server, we have one of the "canned" reports available ("Availability - Yesterday") and in the properties for this we have the used a filter like "Caption like 'PAR%'". The problem is that on the new webengine, an error-message has replaced the report saying something about syntax errors, and it looks to me as if it is trying to use the SQL-qriteria (in this example: 'PAR%') as a column name instead. It's so weird. We tried using custom property fields, regular fields and all kinds of combination, but the problem persists. Solarwinds helpdesk has turned this over to their developers now, but if you have seen anything like this I'd like to hear from you.

Apart from these problems, we have always had performace issues with the webengine, it has improved over time with the higher versions being slightly faster and by first moving the webengine to a seperate platform and later to an actual server. We are using maps A LOT, but even our accounts with no maps are too slow ((30 seconds at best to log in) and I was wondering if others could give me some pointers on how to improve performance, because Solarwinds seem to have run out of ideas.

As mentioned we are also trying out the Wireless and Application Monitor Management packs:

I was quite disappointed that no alerting is possible regarding Applications Monitoring but was told that next version of Orion will have a new Alert engine and that Application-triggered alerts will be possible then. I wonder if the price will change when this becomes possible?

Regarding the Wireless pack: I can't get ANY reporting out on a single one of my 80+ Cisco 1200 Access points (all with IOS' over 12.3). System Manager itself get traffic data from the interfaces just fine, but the WiFi pack doesn't do anything! What the H*** am I doing wrong here?

I want to thank you for reading this far (it got kinda longer than I expected and I would really appreciate any input from you on these subjects on what, in my opinion, is otherwise by far the best buy in Network Management tools you can ever come across!


The hardware platforms are

Orion itself:
a HP/Compaq DL-380-G2 with 2048MB RAM and 3,1GHz Intel Pentium 4 XEON running W2K SP4

Additional Web Server
a HP/Compaq DL-380-G2 with 1024MB RAM and a Dual 1,3 GHz Intel Pentium 3 running W2003 SP1.
(This was recently moved from an IBM Thinkcentre Desktop with 503MB RAM and a 3,0 GHx Intel Pentium 4running W2K Server SP4 but is only performing marginally better now)

The number of nodes monitored are:

Orion Network Performance Monitor Version 7.8.148
NetPerfMon Engine
Network Node Elements 886
Interface Elements 1930
Volume Elements 557
Status Pollers
ICMP Status Polling Index 665 out of 3373
SNMP Status Polling Index 1659 out of 3373
ICMP Polls per second 55
SNMP Polls per second 55
Max Status Polls Per Second 55
Packet Queues
DNS Outstanding 0
ICMP Outstanding 222
SNMP Status Outstanding 188
SNMP Discovery Outstanding 110
SNMP Statistical Outstanding 246
Statistics Pollers
ICMP Statistic Polling Index 1851 out of 5456
SNMP Statistic Polling Index 2869 out of 5456
ICMP Polls per second 55
SNMP Polls per second 55
Max Statistic Polls Per Second 55

Lars Grabowski
Global Infrastructure
Chr. Hansen A/S

Network_Guru

Hello Lars,

Reagarding point #1,
That is exactly how the new System Manager is supposed to work.
It's meant to reduce the load on the server when you open it.
I'm still on V7.6 & I see missed polls if the System Manager is left open for any length of time. Check in the Task Manager on your server & you will see it chewing up lots of memory & CPU time when it's open.

I can't comment on #2 as I have no experience with that.

As for #3:
Anytime you update Orion to a newer version you must open the Custom Property editor and add button to the toolbar. I believe it's called "update Schemas" or something similar.
This will add all the Custom properties you have created back into the Report Writer schema.

As far as performance goes, what is your ICMP polling frequency (mine is 300 seconds).
I believe it's the Interface Statistics polling that really loads down the polling engine.
I leave mine at the 15 minute default and only change it to 5 minutes on my core devices & backbone links.

If you are also running SQL on the polling server, I would add another Gig of RAM.
I'm using 1.7Gb of memory for SQL alone. I show only around 400Mb free once everthing is up and running. This may improve performance for you.

You might want to search for a post regarding "SQL & Memory" in this forum, as there are some SQL memory settings posted there.


-=Cheers=-
NG