Orion Platform 2020.2 and it's Modules Are Now Generally Available

[jvb]

The SolarWinds^® product management team is happy to announce the latest release for all 14 products on Orion Platform 2020.2. Every product has new features available in this release. Download now through your Customer Portal. By downloading the unified SolarWinds Orion installer , you'll be able to upgrade your entire Orion environment in a single, streamlined, upgrade session.

Orion 2020.2

Orion Platform:

• Monitor up to 1,000,000 elements per Orion Platform instance.
  • For SAM components the limit is increased to be 550,000 components per SAM installation.
• 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
• Updated SWIS Schema Documentation

Network Performance Monitor (NPM):

Network Traffic Analyzer (NTA):

• VMware VDS Support
• IPAM IP Group Integration
• Node Traffic Reconciliation

Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

IP Address Manager (IPAM)

User Device Tracker (UDT)

VoIP & Network Quality Manager (VNQM)

Log Analyzer 

Server & Application Monitor (SAM)

Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

Storage Resource Manager (SRM)

Server Configuration Monitor (SCM)

Web Performance Monitor (WPM)

Database Performance Analyzer (DPA)

Enterprise Operations Console (EOC)

[wkwittke]

Very excited for this release. Scheduling a maintenance window for the upgrade/install.

[silverbacksays]

There's so much awesome in this release, looking forward to deploying it on the next greenfield install that comes across my desk 😎

[alexch]

Any plans about Linux KVM support? 

[wkwittke]

Completed my upgrade over the weekend.  No issues.

[bouchm]

@wkwittke 

How long did it take for your upgrade to go through? I'd like to schedule my 2019.4 version upgrade but I ended up spending a few hours last time going to 2019.4. Thanks.

[wkwittke]

@bouchm 

Mine took less than 1 hour; but we only have a single poller.  I am sure the length of time is based on how large your deployment is.

[aLTeReGo]

With the Prestaging and Configuration Wizard improvements made in this release, I think you'll find it takes you a fraction of the time to upgrade to 2020.2 than it did previous releases. 

[dfairles]

@aLTeReGo There was a log installer that was missing for the APE's that I had to get resolved on Friday.  Was that fixed?

Case # 00550186

[aLTeReGo]

@aLTeReGo There was a log installer that was missing for the APE's that I had to get resolved on Friday.  Was that fixed?

Case # 00550186

---

Yes, it appears this issue was resolved in the final GA build under the context of internal case LOG-2982. 

[lufffunk]

@aLTeReGo I asked the following question in the NPM thread, but it's really a platform request. Additionally I have a feature request in JRRA, but don't know how to check the status? CUST-61258

"Get alerts working from additional polling engines... this a limitation that exists today. So if you are using an APE on a network isolated from the MPE (only FW rules in place between MPE and APE), alters won't be able to trigger remote scripts on the nodes managed by the APE."

[tony.johnson]

@lufffunk 

Jira FRs can only be checked internally by SWI users. The ability to trigger alerts on the additional polling engines is one such request I am tracking closely. You mention NPM and Powershell, I am curious as to your specific use case and if you have additional modules installed as some alert actions can be triggered on the target machine when using agent-based monitoring.

[hjarriell]

Upgraded yesterday.

Went smoothly with one exception that I believe the pre-check should be updated to catch/notify about.  If NPcap is in use by another application (such as Tetration), the installation will get hung (for us it was at 78%)   Since the installer seems to give no feedback about what it is actually doing, if it gets stuck you may not know why until it timesout/fails.

[lufffunk]

@tony.johnson Hi Tony, thanks for the quick reply. Instead of me typing it all out here, can I point you at this closed case ID 00433397 which is where we tried to troubleshoot my issue in the first place, which then identified the limitation in the APE.

In a nutshell, one use case is disk space monitoring. When we got an alert for low disk space, we had an action which was to run a powershell script to do a cleanup. This worked from the MPE, but anything hanging off the APE failed.

On a side note - just upgraded to the new version. Performance is much faster.

Thanks

[orionfan]

I upgraded this morning and this is the first time in a very long time that the upgrade process went perfectly through the centralized upgrade.  We have three servers (main poller and two APE's) and the process was about 90 minutes.  

One positive I have discovered with this upgrade is that Log Viewer is working for me now.  I had been having issues where it was timing out when doing searches and thus far it is working normally.  I am going to continue to monitor this.  I was very close during this change window to roll back to the legacy syslog viewer.

I just wanted to share my feedback on the upgrade process.  Thank you Solarwinds for a perfect upgrade!

[bobmarley]

I'm upgrading to 2019.4 tomorrow (for the third attempt) and trying to install Netflow on Thursday. If they fail again may be I'll try this version. 

[jblankjblank]

@bobmarley any specific support cases to reference? 

[bobmarley]

@jblankjblank 

Case # 00536187

Services configuration failed:
• Error while executing script- The logical file name "SolarWindsProd_FG1" is already in use. Choose a different name.
The logical file name "SolarWindsProd_FG3" is already in use. Choose a different name.

[bobmarley]

@jblankjblank 

https://thwack.solarwinds.com/t5/NTA-Discussions/Netflow-installer-failed-with-error-quot-Services-c...

It seemed it was the Netflow portion that I was having issues with. I broke my change up this time into two parts, first upgrade to 2019.4 tomorrow, then on Thursday try installing Netflow. I'm pretty confident the upgrade will go well, its the Netflow install I'm skeptical about. One other item I ran into was the installer quit at the part where it is installing the PCAP portion but I was able to get around that by uninstalling the winpcap and pcap prior to beginning the install. 

[zennifer]

I knew I missed something during COVID!  I started perusing THWACK and I am so very pleased so see the announcement.  Can't wait to get started ... so my post from earlier today is not true.. I am not running the latest release!   Thanks for the upgrade!

[jelliston]

Lots of good things in the update, however, there are a couple thing which have created some major headaches for us.

We run in FIPS mode.

1. With 2020.2 we can no longer push agents from the orion core.

2. Neither the Gold Master nor the GPO agent install work properly as the agent configuration utility fails to run due to folder permissions on the c:\program files (x86)\Solarwinds\agent folder.

3. One feature in SCM we were looking forward to was the Database profiles.  Not supported if running FIPS

Opened tickets with support but no resolution yet.  This is forcing me to manually login to each server needing an agent and since we have SCM, that is every new machine or machine we are bring into SCM.

[bobmarley]

@hjarriell 

I ran into the same thing where another product installs PCAP onto my server. I uninstall PCAP and WinPCAP both prior to the upgrade and 

then the installer runs fine. In my case both ended up being reinstalled. 

[Spiky]

i'm unable to upgrade mine,

says i'm missing source files, for 2 modules (core and mib), I've tried the microsoft install/uninstall  app and that's not fixed anything

I've turned off the root certs, but not rebooted since, I know one product isn't licence, i chose not to renew (even though i cant tell it to not update) the pending windows update check is odd as i rebooted to fix this, but still there

[aLTeReGo]

All installed Product Modules must be the same version. It is not possible to upgrade the others, while keeping one module running on an earlier version, as that older module is not compatible with the latest Orion Platform version.

You will need to uninstall the module you have chosen not to renew maintenance on to upgrade to the latest release. You can install that older module on a separate machine if you wish to continue using it. 

[sphil608]

So am I correct in my understanding: 2019.4 supports 12k-15k network elements before require a new polling engine to be spun up. But 2020.2 supports 1m/polling engine now?

[bshopp]

@sphil608 this is at the Orion instance level, not the per poller level.  Prior to 2020.2 we supported up to 400,000 elements in a single deployment, with 2020.2 we not support 1M elements in a single deployment or instance of Orion.  The per poller numbers have not changed.

[dharmbodh]

@aLTeReGo 

@jvb 

@bshopp 

I tried to install SAM 2020.2 Eval via Offline installer On a Newly built VM of OS Win 2019.
1a. Only SAM product.
2.System Checks got passed
3.SolarWinds Installation Wizard finished successfully.
4. Automatically, Config wizard started to run.
4a. Everything was looking good.
5. When it was about to complete.. (during 87.8% progress)., it displayed below error
"verifying that SWIS service is available FAILED"
6. Finally, Config wizard ended with failure

Please help how can i solve this issue 

[aLTeReGo]

WIthout Configuration Wizard logs its difficult to say for certain what the issue might be. If you have not yet already, please try and run the Configuration Wizard again and see if it self-corrects the issue. If it does not, I would recommend opening a case with support or contact your Sales rep for assistance from a Sales Engineer if you don't already own SAM. In either case, it's likely that they will ask for diagnostics to determine the cause of the problem. 

[yellowsubmarine]

Looking forward to this!