NPM 2020.2 Deep-Dive: MIBs Database Management

NPM 2020.2 is now Generally Available!

It is my pleasure to announce that SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) version 2020.2 is now Generally Available in your customer portal.

Version 2020.2 is the next release following NPM 2019.4 and is compatible with the Orion Platform 2020.2. This is the second of three articles diving into the new features of this release, with this one focusing on MIBs Database Management. The other major features delivered in this release are Microsoft Azure Networking and Device View Improvements. More information on this release can be found in the GA Announcement.  

MIBs Database Management

As I'm sure many of you already know, vendor SNMP implementations rely on semi-proprietary Management Information Bases (MIBs). The MIBs Database in NPM is a massive conglomeration of all the MIBs from all the vendors, and it powers features like UnDP. Prior to this release of NPM 2020.2, the process to update your local NPM deployment's MIBs Database with our latest and greatest version has been rather cumbersome.

While it's still not quite as streamlined as we'd like, NPM 2020.2 brings massively improved integration of the MIB Database into the Orion Web Console. You can check your current version of the MIBs Database, find out whether a newer version is available, and download the latest version - all directly from the Orion Web Console.

You can access the new MIBs Management page under Settings > All Settings > Details.

 

From this page, you can easily check the status of your MIBs Database and download the latest version directly from the Orion Web Console. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to finish integrating the installation process into the console yet, and so this process will presently need to be completed by accessing the Orion Web Console directly from your Orion server. Additionally, the process will need to be repeated manually on Additional Polling Engines (APEs) to ensure a consistent user experience with UnDP in your environment. We hope to further improve this workflow to be even more automated in a future release.

 

For more detailed information, check out the NPM 2020.2 Administrator's Guide!

With NPM 2020.2 comes some fantastic new updates & enhancements to the Orion Platform which include:

• Monitor up to 1,000,000 elements per Orion Platform instance.
• An Orion Map to Success! - Orion Maps improvements, such as creating and customizing text boxes, labels, or layouts, incorporating custom icons, adding shapes, dynamic backgrounds, bulk administration and all-new Time Travel.
• Performance enhancements.
• Dashboards, Dashboards, Get Your Dashboards! All New Custom Summary Dashboards
• A Gateway To Your Fastest Upgrade Ever! - Upgrade improvements, such as pre-staging upgrades, upgrade plan reports, automating upgrades via Orion SDK.
• Enhanced volume status.
• 3rd Party Language Pack Support - scripts to extract UI texts from the Orion Web Console.

Your Feedback Counts!

The NPM team is incredibly interested in your feedback. More importantly, your feedback shapes how we develop our products. Post your thoughts, questions, and concerns into the forum and help to make NPM a better product. If you have a particularly compelling idea, you should also consider putting in a Feature Request and encouraging others to vote on your idea.