NPM 12.2 Upgrade Experience Feedback?

What the Version now ?

Everything went extremely smooth for me. I upgraded NPM, SAM, NCM, UDT, IPAM, and VIM. Much faster upgrade than normal and didn't run into any issues.

We built out a new server to finally get off of 2008.   I was rather dreading this migration and update but it could not have been smoother.   I scheduled a 6 hour downtime window and we were back up and running in just over two ( and of course half of that time was waiting for the Website Optimization to complete )    We migrated/updated  NPM, NCM, IPAM, SAM, WPM and NTA.   No issues.

Upgraded from NPM 11.5.2, NTA, SAM, and SRM for that version all the way to 12.2. took a while but the Upgrade advisor helped a lot. only issue is that every time a page refreshes the stupid pencil popup screen keeps coming up. how do you stop that? this is driving me crazy and I can not figure out how to turn it off.

Finally an all-in-one update installer!

My upgrade went relatively smooth. I had a little trouble with upgrading my additional poller because it kept timing out. The poller install package has a hard limit of 30 min to gather all the info from the main poller. I found that if you grab 'CoreInstaller.msi' and 'MIbs.msi' from C:\ProgramData\Solarwinds\Installers on the main poller and manually copy them to your additional poller you can cut a bunch of that 30 min window. Copy those files to your desktop. Then start the install on the additional poller. As soon as you start, you need to look for C:\Users\[your user]\AppData\Local\Temp\2\SWOrionSetup[datestamp]\subinstallers\CORE_2017.x\. (This directory won't be created until you start your install.) Immediately paste those files you copied over to your desktop into this directory and it'll shave off almost a gig of download (depending on the number of modules in your environment) and help keep you from timing out.

It's well worth the upgrade. I'm looking forward to future upgrades with the new all-in-one installer.

The only feedback i have is that after the upgrade a number of thresholds for ASA hardware health seemed to be messed up (using Orion defaults). to stop the alerts i had to go in there and set custom thresholds. The values it populated were correct, just the thresholds were messed up.

But im loving the new ASA insight and ACL insight it has.

As far as upgrade process i enjoyed the new installer that they have for it. No longer needing to go through the upgrade adviser was nice. was able to update 4 products (NPM 12.2, NCM 7.7, SAM 6.4 HF 1, and NTA 4.2.3) all in under an hour. And there were no issues or errors with the actual install process. Like i said the only problem that i encountered is what was described above.

This afternoon I had a successful upgrade from NPM 12.0.1 to 12.2.  Thanks to serena and her peers, I think we all learned some useful things about users like me, and ASA 5525-X's, and the upgrade process.

Time will tell how much new learning curve I have in front of me, but this upgrade certainly shows tremendous progress towards simplifying and making a "complete" upgrade of all SW products intuitive and successful.

It went more smoothly, and much better, with less frustration on my part, than all previous Solarwinds upgrades I've done.

Kudos to you Solarwinds!

Environment before upgrade.

NPM 12.1, NTA 4.2.2, VMAN 7.1, IPAM 4.5.0, NCM 7.6, SAM 6.4, SRM 6.4

First about a month ago I started preparing and moved our main NPM/Orion from 2008 server to 2016.  Then a few weeks ago moved NTA from 2008 to 2016.  Our SQL was/is already on a new platform being supported.  We used to have STM or the old profiler running on a 2008 server too, but no longer use it so just disabled that integration to be left with just SRM.

Ran the new install file.  I didn't note all the warnings, but nothing was a red flag not allowing me to continue.  Even though we have more RAM and CPU cores than required, it complained because our VM environment has 2.2GHz and not the required 3.0 I think it said.  Another warning was on our VMAN 7.1 saying we would either need to migrate after the upgrade, or moved to VMAN 8 appliance.

This was probably the smoothest large update I have done as we had 5 product updates.  I was nervous and worried.  Once finished, I ran NTA 4.3.2 on our separate DB server.  I then ran the VMAN wizard to change from 7.1 appliance to the new VMAN Orion poller.

Total outage was around 35 mins for us.

I have noticed some bugs/issues, but as for the upgrade process I'm relieved and hope they continue to build on this and become more comfortable for all.

Upgrade 12.2 RC1 - RC3 to 12.2 official. Seems kind of weird, but RC3 became the defacto official.

Anyway, I have noticed some interesting anomalies that have been a bear to troubleshoot.

First: One of my ASA devices would not show serial number and site to site VPN. In fact I have to make sure that only the Node Details my SolarWinds is selected to provide the SNMP data for the details. Anything other poller the device will become an unknown.

Second: I just went and looked at the reports to find the report that provides the inventory which would let me mitigate the fact that one of three ASA devices doesn't show the serial number and behold, there are 0, ZERO reports listed.

Third: One of the best outputs of in these recent versions is being able to monitor site to site VPNs, stopped working. While working with tech support I found out that there is going to be a HOT FIX to repair something.

I am working to get a separate SQL server stood up which will help I think and eventually a physical server to remove it from the sometime sketchy virtual environment.

so i went with the upgrade just now   i have npm, ncm, ipan and udt

and this is the error i got, and now i have a complete  unusable system

If I might be so bold as to offer Installer Error Reports suggestions:

1. It's unnecessary to indicate "we detected a problem."
2. The largest text on the page should be applied to the actual problem.
3. The robot overwhelms the page, indicating a problem, but no solution.  In fact, no one here knows how to help a dazed robot, so we're left stunned & confused too.  Although the robot IS pretty cute.
4. Lose the "Close the installer" link, and replace it with the instructions necessary to diagnose, troubleshoot, and correct the problem.  A link to installer logs might be useful, if those logs stated the problem, like "A duplicate version of ActiveDiagnostics version 12345 was detected.  Cancel this installation of that same product and restart the process, skipping installing ActiveDiagnostics", or the equivalent.

Performed the upgrade this afternoon (NPM, UDT, NTA, NCM).  Installer went smoothly and probably around an hour.  NPM 12.1 was the old platform and Win 2K16 server.

Unfortunately, it created havoc in my environment.  My most critical ASA 5520 failover pair became unusable and started rebooting.  I had to unmanage them in Orion to get them stable again (after powering off each as Orion was reporting them with dead fans and temp warnings as well as the reboots). It also caused a number of Cisco APs in my environment to become unresponsive and reported them as rebooting repeatedly.  The telnet/SSH console was so unresponsive that I couldn't manage to login.  Changed them to ICMP only polling and service was restored.

Also have a Citrix SD-WAN appliance with a similar symptom and reporting in Orion as rebooting every 30 minutes now. I checked the appliance and it doesn't appear to be restarting so this may be a SYSUPTIME reporting issue, although I have 4 other SD-WAN appliances on the network that aren't reporting issues...

I have a case open and awaiting feedback.... beware on upgrading your prod environment.

PS: I noticed some else reported the 0C temp reporting on their ASA.  I have a 5525-X failover pair reporting the same.  It is also reporting the fans are all spinning at 0 rpm.  Might need to report that as well.

Cheers,

Aaron

Hello,

We've some serious problem after the upgrade from version 12.1 to 12.2.

The installation part was fine without any error but the license store is now corrupted.

We tryed to follow this thread :

https://support.solarwinds.com/Success_Center/Orion_Platform/Orion_Documentation/Corrupted_license_store

However we have an error when trying to launch migration.exe /ExpireAll command , reporting that The license store is not in valid state

Anyone have this problem?

We've already opened the Case #1295467 but we're still awaiting an answer from the support service .

Thanks in advice

I'll have to watch this thread...

The upgrade was smooth, I liked the new monitoring for ASA and I see a great future for that, but I am also having the same issue as I see many people complaining regarding Health Monitoring at some of my ASA's.

I have opened a ticket to check that and the conclusion was that the IOS version of the devices I am having trouble are older than the ones that are showing the information correctly.

OK, I understand that but before the firewall insight feature, it was possible to verify these sensors at that devices. And I cannot simply go ahead and upgrade many devices that are currently running stable only to correct monitoring system problems.

I hope there is a hotfix coming soon.

I went from Orion Platform 2017.1.1 SP1, VIM 7.1.0, VNQM 4.4.0, DPAIM 11.0.0, NPM 12.1, QoE 2.3, NTA 4.2.2, NCM 7.6, NetPath 1.1.0, CloudMonitoring 1.0.0, SAM 6.4.0

to .... wait, I can no longer scrape that from the bottom of the web window. Must be a graphic element now. Reverting to Soviet mode copy and paste (eyeballs, fingers, and keystrokes):

to Orion Platform 2017.3, VIM 8.0.0, VNQM 4.4.1, DPAIM 11.0.0, NPM 12.2, QoE 2.4, NTA 4.2.3, NCM 7.7, NetPath 1.1.2, CloudMonitoring 1.0.0, SAM 6.4.0

The new downloads are somewhat confusing. I normally go through the Upgrade Advisor to determine the exact products I need to download, and then download the full packages, which I guess is called the offline package now. I saw the note that said

IMPORTANT! The latest releases - NPM 12.2, NCM 7.7, SRM 6.5, UDT 3.3, IPAM 4.5.2, VNQM 4.4.1 and NTA 4.2.3– utilize a new SolarWinds Orion installer that handles product compatibility and upgrades for you.

I tried the Online package, which is marked as recommended. I cannot recommend it after my experience. Originally, I was just going to upgrade IPAM to 4.5.2. The Online package made it clear that it was going to upgrade all upgradable products, and that I would have to wait for each download. So I canceled, and tried the Offline. When I went to apply hotfixes, I realize that it wanted Orion Platform 2017.3 Hot Fix 1, which I think implies NPM12.2.

So I checked the Upgrade advisor, and it does not list IPAM 4.5.2 - only 4.5.1, because 4.5.2 is the new style.

So I proceeded to download the offline for that NPM12.2, ran into various severe errors during install, and concluded that I needed to uninstall, then reinstall various existing, old modules.

But the download page no longer lists the old modules. There's a link for Archived HotFixes, but even it is not complete.

The HotFixes listed for current versions are sometimes odd. For IPAM 4.5.2, it lists IP Address Manager v4.5.1 Hot Fix 1. Do I really need that?

I finally reinstalled all previous versions (because I'm a packrat, and maintain on-disk copies for just this eventuality), and decided to do the online install. I got various Config Wizard errors for almost every product. I pressed on, and finally got a run of the Config-Wizard that came up clean. I don't feel at all comfortable with the result.

Problems I would like to see you address:

• Provide downloads of older versions of products and their hotfixes
• Provide Release Notes downloads for all products on the download page instead of just at the documentation page
• Make sure Release Notes list product prerequisites. IPAM does not - it says "IPAM 4.5.2 is an Orion Platform product, and consumes Orion Platform 2017.3."  It did not say that Orion Platform 2017.3 requires NPM 12.2 - I sorta surmised that. I cannot download Orion Platform 2017.3 separately. Odd use of the verb, "consumes", BTW.
• Make it clear which versions on Orion/Admin/Details/OrionCoreDetails.aspx, the Orion Platform Details page go with which product and which version. Mark shared components as such. List all this is the Release notes.
• Make sure the Online packages give an estimate of the amount of data to download and can recover from HTTPS failures without a complete abort (we have an HTTPS cache that messes up sometimes).
• Make sure the Offline packages check prerequisites properly, and issue helpful messages.
• Make it clear how to do re-installs when using Online install method.
• Perhaps consider making Offline install packages for the components, like Orion Platform 2017.3.
• Explain your install logic better so I can make decisions better. When do shared components get re-installed? What are the ramifications of re-installing each component - e.g. which ones require the Config Wizard to run? Which products can I install back to back without running the Config-Wizard after each?

Thanks!