Moving Basic and Advanced Alerts

Question

Hello,

I've been set the task to refresh the infrastructure that Solarwinds sits on.  I need to install two new physical servers (application & SQL) so I'm currently looking at the documentation regarding specifications for a multi-module install.  I've only ever created alerts so I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment.

The documention that Solarwinds provides is really good and very helpful but it's not clear to me if I will be able to move the current basic/advanced alerts across to the new server.  I know I can move the database, Licences, custom reports and scripts etc but how do I get my custom alerts across.  Any help/advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

Anita Roberts

anitazuri · Answer

Hello,

Thanks for your reply, we are currently using Orion Platform 2011.1.5300  NPM 12 & SAM 6.2.4 on Windows 2008 R2 and we create our alerts through the Web UI.

We plan to upgrade NPM and SAM on the old server first then perform the migration.  The main objective is to upgrade the physical server as it's pretty old and any use of Solarwinds, whether directly on the server or via the Web UI, is extremely slow.

One problem we may have is our SMS alerts apparently the module that does this has a serial interface and I'm expecting that the new hardware won't support this.  Maybe I can start another conversation when I understand more about this side of things.

anitazuri · Answer

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your reply, Building the SQL server first then pointing the old server to it is a good idea.  Because we are using the same IP and Hostname I need to make the transition as smooth as possible and I think this idea will definitely contribute to that.

mesverrum · Answer

I think part of the difficulty you may have in figuring this all out is that the process has changed over the years so it depends which version you have right now and which version you will be migrating to ultimately.  It is a good idea to get a support ticket open for this so they can spot check your process but to address your question about the alerts, in very old versions the alerts were managed through a tool on the server itself, but still stored in the database.  In newer versions they are managed exclusively through the web UI but are stored in a different format within the database.  If you go through the necessary intermediate version upgrades to get from where you are to where you want to be it will handle migrating them over to the new system automatically.

When doing a migration and an upgrade like this you typically want to break those into two completely separate phases.  If you do a fresh install of the latest versions and point them at an older database then you can have problems, so I like to do my upgrade to the latest versions in place on the existing servers.  Once that is all up and running (even if running poorly due to old hardware) I make a copy of that database and move it to the new SQL server. Once that is done I do a fresh install the same versions as I upgraded to on the new Orion Application server and point it at the migrated db on the new SQL server.  If your new server does not have the same name/IP address as the old system you may have to do some cleanup to remove any references to the old system from the db, but I find that when possible I prefer to just decom the old server and steal it's IP and hostname so I don't have to update my access lists and such.