We've been live on 2020.2.5 for about an hour now. While it seems good, overall, we're now hitting issues with our use of Modern Dashboards. Issues we're seeing so far: * If your column/swql names have a SPACE or SLASH in them you will get some not very helpful failure messages and the data will not populate.* I have tons of modern tables with spaces in them and this took a bit to figure out. Now I have to update all of them. Boo... * Complex sorting (ORDER BY) seems to be completely non-functional.* There is a new [SORTING] option in the main [PRESENTATION] config for the modern tables for simple sorting. * You can also click on headers now to dynamically sort. Nice! * If you have more complex sorting using multiple fields and/or hidden values like I do you are out of luck. The [ORDER BY] directive seems to be completely ignored. * Column widths seem buggy.* At least in some of my tables, the column widths seem way way off, as in way wider than before for the same value. This is a smaller issue, but quite annoying nonetheless. * The arrows to move columns has been replaced by drag and drop. This is nice, but...* The column order seems to revert when you drop the column, BUT if you look at the preview the column did indeed get rearranged. You can save and then edit again to see the columns in the right order in the main editing section. This can get confusing fast. * Column names that used to be perfectly valid that collide with SWQL terms will cause your table to simply not work. [Group] and [Where] are 2 that I have used multiple times. I had to change them all. You can make the display name whatever you want, but the SWQL column names cannot be anything like that. * Visualization: Add a linear bar chart ... no longer working at all I'm hoping some fixes will be forthcoming. In the meantime, I have a lot of things to fix - and a lot of things I can't fix yet. Are there other things breaking that I've not yet run into? (Edited to consolidate all my little posts into the main post)

I have replied to your other thread in relation to the KPI links. If nodes are not categorized, how do you differentiate nodes between cities A and B? Although not strictly necessary, have you considered using custom properties to define the city for each node?

Hi , thank you for reply I am using 2020.2.6

Hello, what version are you using?

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2020.2.5 Modern Dashboard Issues

christophercamacho1

We've been live on 2020.2.5 for about an hour now. While it seems good, overall, we're now hitting issues with our use of Modern Dashboards.

Issues we're seeing so far:

If your column/swql names have a SPACE or SLASH in them you will get some not very helpful failure messages and the data will not populate.
- I have tons of modern tables with spaces in them and this took a bit to figure out. Now I have to update all of them. Boo...
Complex sorting (ORDER BY) seems to be completely non-functional.
- There is a new [SORTING] option in the main [PRESENTATION] config for the modern tables for simple sorting.
- You can also click on headers now to dynamically sort. Nice!
- If you have more complex sorting using multiple fields and/or hidden values like I do you are out of luck. The [ORDER BY] directive seems to be completely ignored.
Column widths seem buggy.
- At least in some of my tables, the column widths seem way way off, as in way wider than before for the same value. This is a smaller issue, but quite annoying nonetheless.
The arrows to move columns has been replaced by drag and drop. This is nice, but...
- The column order seems to revert when you drop the column, BUT if you look at the preview the column did indeed get rearranged. You can save and then edit again to see the columns in the right order in the main editing section. This can get confusing fast.
Column names that used to be perfectly valid that collide with SWQL terms will cause your table to simply not work. [Group] and [Where] are 2 that I have used multiple times. I had to change them all. You can make the display name whatever you want, but the SWQL column names cannot be anything like that.
Visualization: Add a linear bar chart ... no longer working at all

I'm hoping some fixes will be forthcoming. In the meantime, I have a lot of things to fix - and a lot of things I can't fix yet.

Are there other things breaking that I've not yet run into?

(Edited to consolidate all my little posts into the main post)

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christophercamacho1

I just realized that there are new options in the overall table config ('Presentation') including search functions, refresh time, and... order by column. This works for simple cases, but unfortunately not all my desired default sorts are simple.

Overall its a good update, but its been painful for me being the admin so far.

christophercamacho1

Here's a fun one that burned some serious time...

If you have a column named [Group] then nothing you can do will ever get the table to work. I don't know how many different permutations I tried to get that column to populate when suddenly I decided to just rename the SWQL column to [GroupName] ... boom, worked fine. Out of curiosity I tried adding a random column of data named [Where] ... table dead.

So if you are using what were perfectly valid column names before that apparently collide with swql terms, the table will absolutely refuse to work in this revision. I hope this saves someone the hours I spent trying to figure this out.

Ouch.

chrisorourke

Can confirm odd behavior throughout.

Was not prepared for perfstack to not work without changing quite a few things within those widgets. Also the font selections and scaling on KPI is nice. Though despite all of the changes made it surprises me I still can't turn off scroll on table widgets.

Right now I have a couple of widgets that should be blank most of the time. One that lists databases in a failed state and the other than list what nodes are down. Now I get an error when those try to load.

christophercamacho1

Things to remember while you try to fix your modern widgets:

If you have to rename all the fields in use by a column, when you save the custom SWQL the column will vanish. You then have to recreate it, which may mean dragging columns around and dealing with the other bugs.
You can approach fixing tables one of 2 ways that I've thought up so far. Both involve editing the widget multiple times...
1. Rename all but 1 of the fields associated with a table column. Save your swql. Edit the column to replace all the missing values. Save the table widget. Edit the table widget. Rename the last field, update the column again, save the swql and table.
2. Duplicate the fields with names the 2020.2.5 version likes. Save your swql. Edit your column to use all the new field names. Save the table. Edit the table. Remove all the non-compliance fields. Save the swql and table.

I'm not done fixing modern dashboards by a long shot, but I can't see straight at this point. The rest will have to wait for tomorrow.

If you are as deep in the modern dashboards trenches as I am, you might want to wait a bit to see if they decide to address these issues...

chrisorourke

I've got most all of my fixable on my end issues resolved.

Remaining issues are all reported as bugs such as:

Donut charts won't display if widget is small and legend contains more than 3 items. (data shows just no actual chart)

Widgets where expected result is null error out each time they refresh.

PerfStack widgets with line chart data that had been working perfectly now show blank only.

Weirdest part of this patch is getting the NTA configuration database bug again. Despite not having NTA installed now or at any time before on this instance of Orion.

tony.johnson

Thank you for such detailed feedback. I am sorry for the problems these have caused you and the time you have invested into resolving these. We are working to fix these issues as soon as possible. I would like to share our plans for these and to understand some of your specific needs in more detail.

1. Space or / in the column name. This is a known issue that was identified shortly after the release. The fix is planned for an upcoming hotfix

2. Complex Sorting. This may be a consequence of providing client-side sorting and lazy loading. Sorting options in the [PRESENTATION] of the widget does allow you to use columns that are hidden, but they must be added to the table configuration i.e uncheck the 'Show this column' for the individual column, it will remain in the list of sortable columns. Could you provide a sample query with complex sorting for reference?

3. Column Widths. I am not aware of any change in this behavior, are you by chance using any browser extension which may change the styling?

4. Drag And Drop Editor. Again for this, it is a known issue that was identified shortly after the release. The fix is planned for an upcoming hotfix

5. Column Names with reserved keywords. This has also been improved in the scope of the fix planned for #1. [Group] and [Where] can be used as column aliases

6. Liner chart not working. I am unable to reproduce this issue. Are you completely unable to add a new chart to a new widget or have the linear bar charts disappeared from existing widgets?

If you have opened any cases for these I would appreciate you sharing the case numbers with me.

tony.johnson

Could you share the details of these reports to help run these down?

christophercamacho1

Thanks for the updates.

Linear Charts: Most of these are working, but they are incredibly slow to load initially. A few did not work at all and of course those were the ones I used the most. Creating a new widget to load them did not resolve the issue, but oddly when I changed the perfstack then undid the change to allow me to re-save it, the graphs started working immediately. It was very odd.

Column Widths: This issue seems to only affect Firefox. These are rendering correctly in Chrome. My Firefox install is pretty barebones - WebEx and LastPass are it. If I set a width on a column it ends up being way wider in Firefox than it should be. As I have another application that recently seemed to develop issues with Firefox, I have largely switched to Chrome.

chrisorourke

Well for the majority of the issues I've worked around them and fixed without keeping notes but the default legend block you shared SELECT COUNT(1) AS Count_Items, Status
FROM Orion.Nodes
GROUP BY Status

Is the one where if all 6 status are active the pie chart disappears due to size constraints.

christophercamacho1

Totally forgot to go over some complex sorting scenarios. My bad.

Some complex sorting scenarios can indeed be simulated with revised table logic. This isn't always easy to achieve, though. I have some overview dashboards, for example, that combine lists of servers and sort them by a number of fields. The ORDER BY statement might look like this:

ORDER BY [StatusFlag] ASC, N.CustomProperties.Dept_SubGroup ASC, [SpecialSort] ASC, N.Caption ASC

Under normal circumstances when everything is green, this sorts by subgroup (for example my team has BlueCat, SolarWinds, ThousandEyes, Venafi, and others), then any special sorting fields (BlueCat tags the IPAM boxes to come first, SolarWinds tags the main pollers, then APEs, then web servers, etc) and then the node caption.

The 'fun' part is the way [StatusFlag] works.

CASE

WHEN N.Status=1 THEN 1000

WHEN N.Status=3 THEN 30

WHEN N.Status=9 THEN 99

ELSE N.Status

END AS [StatusFlag]

This does some minimal massaging of the status flag and pushes anything that is not green to the top of the list automatically without affecting how the rest of the table is sorted.

With the changes, I am forced to pick a single field so I sort by subgroup and lose the ability to bubble up troubled servers. I don't see an easy avenue to incorporate the complex sorting I was able to use previously. Unless I can add additional sorting fields for the initial sort, I have to let go of this capability.

christophercamacho1

Another simple 'complex' sort - Used for my alerting widgets. 

CASE

<span class="s0"> </span><span class="s5">WHEN</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s11">ac</span><span class="s10">.</span><span class="s11">Severity</span><span class="s10">=</span><span class="s4">2</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s5">THEN</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s4">1</span>

<span class="s0"> </span><span class="s5">WHEN</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s11">ac</span><span class="s10">.</span><span class="s11">Severity</span><span class="s10">=</span><span class="s4">3</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s5">THEN</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s4">2</span>

<span class="s0"> </span><span class="s5">WHEN</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s11">ac</span><span class="s10">.</span><span class="s11">Severity</span><span class="s10">=</span><span class="s4">1</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s5">THEN</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s4">3</span>

<span class="s0"> </span><span class="s5">WHEN</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s11">ac</span><span class="s10">.</span><span class="s11">Severity</span><span class="s10">=</span><span class="s4">0</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s5">THEN</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s4">4</span>

<span class="s0"> </span><span class="s5">WHEN</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s11">ac</span><span class="s10">.</span><span class="s11">Severity</span><span class="s10">=</span><span class="s4">4</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s5">THEN</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s4">5</span>

<span class="s0"> </span><span class="s5">END</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s5">AS</span><span class="s0"> </span><span class="s10">[</span><span class="s11">Sort</span><span class="s10">]</span>

[... snip ...]

ORDER BY [Sort], ah.TimeStamp DESC

This lets me sort by priority, then timestamp. On smaller scope alert sets this isn't a huge deal, but on the larger pages where there might be a fair number of alerts then it's important to properly sort by priority and timestamp. I can't think of a logic-based workaround for this one myself.

usman.saleem

Hi, Might be its not big issue for you but im stuck as I created KPI widget for all nodes status those are up, down or in critical state but when i want to clck on nodes down widget, it should redirect me to page where I can see which node is down but that widget doesn't redirect me to that page.

Also I want to create widget for city wise nodes where I can see how many nodes are in City A or In City B but i don't know how to summarize this in SWQL query? In my solarwinds environment Nodes are not categorically described if it belongs to city A or CIty B. Is there an SWQL query for this as well?