Yesterday, I completed my upgrade the Orion 2018.4 HF2 platform, along with upgrades to Web Performance Monitor (formerly SeUM) , SRM, SCM, NPM, DPAIM, NTA, Server & Application Monitor, and NetPath. This was my first upgrade with the new centralized upgrade tool and I'm very happy with the results.
I would consider my deployment of SolarWinds of a good size with 1 primary server and 11 APEs. In the past, I would have to download the offline installer, run the install and configuration manager on my primary and then move the file to each APE. The install was never the problem, it was running the configuration wizard that would take what felt like forever on the APEs. The last upgrade I did took two 8 hour days and left the organization flying blind overnight. Having an outage is never a good thing and it's funny how people do not pay attention to SolarWinds until they realize its just not there.
Anyways, yesterday's upgrade went a lot better! I started around 9 am with the upgrade to my primary poller and then moved to the centralized upgrade tool to upgrade my APEs. Total time for upgrade was just under 4 hours! Not to bad I think for a deployment of our size. Everything came up without issue and I had alerting back up and running by 3 pm. Just a few call outs for anyone that has yet to upgrade.
Root Certificate Update - Group Policy Edit
Prior to having the centralized upgrade working, you have to make a small Group Policy edit to your Pollers. Under Administrative Templates > System > Internet Communication Management > Internet Communication settings you need to edit the "Turn off Automatic Root Certificates Updates". This must be set to "Enabled" for the centralized upgrade to work. This was detected during the preflight checks on my systems. Obviously, not a huge blocker but personally, I didn't see anything in any of the write-ups about the upgrade that mentioned this so I figured I would call it out.
SAML Support
The configuration for SAML is super easy and works great. I just had to have my security develop the certification and within minutes SSO was up and running. The hardest part of enabling this was having to rebuild all my accounts as SAML Groups. I'm sure over the next few days I will get his with some "hey I can't access" messages which are fine. Either way, it's great to see this long-awaited feature request come to the system.
Overall, I am very happy with how the upgrade went. Now when I upgrade, I don't have to worry about a multiple day outage which will make everyone very happy!
