Solarwinds software quality

Question

Is it just me or is SW's QA process broken?  In less than 3 months, 4 service packs for 9.5 have been released.  If Microsoft did this, they'd be skewered.  I upgraded from 9.1 SP3  to 9.5 SP3 last night, starting at 9 pm.  I'm still fighting it.  Maps were all screwed up.  Still not working right.  I had to reinstall SP3 about 4 times to get it to take.  Once I had to run the 9.5 install to 'repair' because SP3 wouldn't run any longer and I had no 'NetPerfMonService'.  Now the web service keeps dying so I have to recycle the app pool about once an hour (I guess SP4 is supposed to fix that but we'll see).

Everytime I go to do a SW upgrade, I feel like I'm playing Russian Roulette (sp), I literally NEVER know what to expect.  I can't tell you how much downtime I've had over the past two weeks bringing an older install of 8.5.0 up to the latest.  EVERY upgrade has been problematic.

Solarwinds has always said something like "written for network engineers by network engineers".  Well, I guess I'd have to say that they've been out of the trench for a while because I have very little time as it is and then to have software that's so poorly developed and tested simply says they're trying to push a product out the door.  I don't know what SW's product testing policy is BUT I can tell you that it's not sufficient.  I realize that they can't test every possible combination but I'm talking about stupid stuff like does the map work after upgrading or when you edit the map for the zoom level, does it actually take the first 3 times?  What about does the web server work after an hour?  I mean come on!!  This is making me look really bad to my management especially when I'm new at the job.  I was just talking to them yesterday about retiring CiscoWorks in lieu of Orion but I simply have lost confidence in the quality of the product.

Assuming I can get this current installation finally functioning and not have to trouble my dba's to restore an old database and have a couple more days/nights of downtime, I swear not to upgrade anymore until maybe a year after they've released a major update.  This is simply too painful.

And yes, I've opened support tickets.......

/rant

FormerMember · Answer

Microsoft does do this. I am hopeing Microsoft Windows will be comming out of beta one of these days.  It has been in beta since 1995.  They almost had a stable OS with Win2k but they went away from that and are now floundering more than ever.

As I tell my friends one day Windows will recieve its last patch and when you boot up it will say Welcome to <insert Linux flavor of choice>.  Then Windows will be a stable OS.

FormerMember · Answer

First, I'd like to apologize for the experience you've had.  It's not the norm, but it's more common that we'd like.  For 9.5 in particular, we had a number of issues with Network Atlas, and much of what we've been doing in these service packs is fixing those problems.

We agree that there are some weaknesses in our overall engineering and release process, and we are making significant changes internally to make things better.  The proof will be in the upgrade experience for the next release.  Again, I'm sorry your particular upgrade experience hasn't been better, and we are committed to making it better in the future.