Hi all,
I use the Upgrade Advisor a lot, it gives me a great PDF of the upgrade path that I can shove under the noses of my clients to prove the upgrade path I specified is correct! It also provides me with a tool to double check my own assumptions when planning an upgrade, very useful.
BUT....
Some of my clients return to the SolarWinds fold after some time away (read: they have an ancient install of NPM or other product, the license for which has been out of support for a year). When they do, and they want to upgrade. On these rare occasions I need to plan multi-step upgrade paths, starting from a version of software which is not supported by SolarWinds any longer. These are not currently listed in the Advisor.
Case in point, a client needed to go from NPM 10.0.1 to NPM 11.5.2. including a change of physical hardware, so I needed to ensure that the OS and SQL versions I installed on the new box could support both the old and bleeding edge versions of the Orion database apps, The Advisor doesn't go that far back for NPM, in fact you can't even download the NPM 10.0.1 full installer from the downloads section of the portal, as it is out of support (luckily the previous admin didn't tidy up after himself and left the original installers on the server!). I needed to raise a ticket get the information I needed to make the call on OS/SQL licensing for the new server.
Whilst response was quick and professional, it does add to your ticket workload. My idea would be to upgrade the advisor so that it looks at unsupported versions.
