Orion Upgrade

Question

Not really excited about doing this....but I guess I have to. :'(

Curious to know what to expect when upgrading from 7.85 to 8.1. I've read the post about the time it takes to upgrade the database....what else? What benefits did you receive.....does it work any better?

torrielw · Answer

Thanks to all who have responded. Tonight is the night I will make the plunge.

My fingers are cross it goes......somewhat smoothly.

Network_Guru · Answer

Please see this post for my upgrade experiences.

So after using this for a week, here are my thoughts:

* Compared to V7.8, the performance of the web site seems to be a bit snappier.
* If you have any older devices that are not SNMPV2 capable, you will need to revisit each one & change the poller to V1 (all nodes are set to V2 after the upgrade).
* The SNMP discovery engine is much improved over V7.8
* The ability to filter the nodes by any property in System Manager is a huge bonus
* Adding Custom Pollers is a breeze
* No more gaps in polling during the nightly DB maint. (you don't know how many years & waited for that one).
* There is an issue with the Advanced alerting engine causing 1000's of events to show up in the Windows Event Viewer - Solarwinds.net log. However it still seems to be working. I have a ticket open with SW support on this.

Overall I must give this 2 thumbs up.The next order of business is to install a 2nd poller & a dedicated server for the SQL DB (being built/installed right now).
My 2nd poller will be 45ms away from the DB over an OC12 - I hope this does not cause issues.

patwill66 · Answer

I upgraded my 50GB database and it took about 4.5 hours.  The database tripled in size so my server ran out of space the first time.  Luckily I took a backup of the DB right before I upgraded.  I had to restore the backup, add more disk to the server and run the DB from the new disk.

As far as it running, I have not been so lucky.  I have applied all six hotfix's and I have problems everyday.  I have to restart the NPM and Alert services every morning when I come in because the website wont work and I cant go in and open up the alert manager.  Once the services are restarted, it works fine.

Also, every Monday I have had to reboot the server because data collection has stopped over the course of the weekend.  When looking at the graphs, you can see the data stops collecting sometime in the morning.  This looks great when I present summary graphs to management and they ask how our stats were over the weekend.

I have also been having issues with advanced alerting and it actually working.  I will create an alert with a threshold of 85% or higher and there will be an alert trigger for something that is at 65%.  Another one I have been battling is trying to alert on only Fixed Disk, but it seems to alert on all volumes.

I have opened up three tickets with support in the last two weeks.  The one regarding having to restart the services/server I am told is going to be fixed.  I havent got anything back yet on the alerting issue.

I am running SQL 2000 Standard on Server 2003.  I have the Orion application and SQL on the same server.  They have suggested I most the two of them apart, which I agree, and they say this may be causing some of the issues.

I wish you luck.