Revised: 2/9/2009

Installing

Upgrading & Configuring

New Features

Fixed Issues

Open Issues

Uninstalling

Legal

These release notes provide additional guidance for SolarWinds Orion Application Performance Monitor (Orion APM) v2.5.

Installing this Version

Orion APM version 2.5 requires Orion Network Performance Monitor (Orion NPM) version 9.1 Service Pack 3 or later.

Warnings:

The Orion APM web console must be able to communicate with the polling engine on TCP port 17777. If you are within a secured network and have separated the polling engine component from the web console or are using additional pollers, make sure the polling engine is reachable on port 17777.
Orion NPM and Orion APM do not support the use of case-sensitive database servers.
Whenever you install a new module or upgrade Orion NPM, ensure you first back up your database.

Note:

If you are installing Orion APM through a terminal server session, use the Add or Remove Programs utility on you server (Start > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs) to run the Orion APM installer. For more information, see "Installing Application Performance Monitor" in the SolarWinds Orion Application Performance Monitor Administrator Guide.

Upgrading and Configuring

This section provides guidance on upgrading and configuring Orion APM.

Upgrading Orion APM

Log on to your Orion NPM server as a Windows administrator.
Run the Orion APM 2.5 installer on your Orion NPM server.

Migrating to Another Server

If you need to move your Orion NPM server to another physical hardware platform and the server includes Orion APM, complete the migration using the Orion NPM Migration Technical Reference. After following the procedures to migrate your database, you will need to open the Credentials Library of Orion APM and reenter your passwords. Encryption of the passwords is local to the Orion NPM server on which Orion APM is installed.

Enabling Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

Orion APM continues to provide accurate statistical measurements through the use of Microsoft WMI. Some Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 application servers require you to manually configure WMI on them before Orion APM can monitor WMI on these computers. For more information, see:

New Features

Orion APM v2.5 contains the following improvements:

New Template Assignment Wizard

Start monitoring your application servers within minutes with our new Template Assignment Wizard. Choose a template from the 40+ available application templates, select the servers to which you want to assign the template, and then specify the server password.

New Testing Feature for Templates and Component Monitors

Now you can test application monitor templates and component monitors before you create them. Testing allows you to immediately identify wrong passwords and potential Microsoft WMI issues.

New Email Round Trip Component Monitors

New component monitors provide true performance testing for IMAP, POP3, and MAPI email servers.

New Application Templates

Effortlessly monitor popular applications such as Exchange 2007 and SQL 2008. Additional templates now allow you to monitor download speeds, changed files, FTP file transfers, broken web page hyperlinks, LDAP services, and more.

Browse Available Processes and WMI Performance Counters

Create component monitors for any server by picking from a list of available processes and WMI performance counters. Creating custom component monitors has never been so easy.

Fixed Issues in this Release

This release of Orion APM fixes the following issues:

Orion APM reports now respect selections made on the Report Grouping tab of the Report Writer application.
You can now type <Text in the search string for an HTTP or HTTPS monitor without a validation error.
TCP DNS monitor now works properly with packets larger than 512 bytes.
Component monitors no longer intermittently go into unknown status on 64-bit hosts.
Script component monitors now terminate scripts after the timeout expires.
Zero process instance counts for Windows Service, Process Monitor SNMP, and Process Monitor WMI components are now correctly reported as 0.
Reports can be correctly filtered by date or time.
SNMP Process component monitors in a warning or a critical state no longer create Orion Events Table log entries on each poll.
The Web Console no longer crashes if the Time field of an APM chart resource is left blank.
Data formats are displayed according to Windows regional settings.
Assigned application templates now report the correct status even if they contain SNMP Process component monitors with empty warning or critical threshold values.
The values of the max and average response times are now computed correctly for "Average Response time of each Component" report.
Assigning a Windows Script Monitor no longer displays a "Value cannot be null" error.
The Oracle User Experience Monitor no longer contains a misleading "WindowsAuthentication" field.

Open Issues in this Release

This release of Orion APM includes the following open issues:

The help link text is shown truncated in IE7.0.
The resource "Top 10 Processes by CPU Load" is missing the "CPU Load" heading.
When adding component monitors to a template or assigned application, the "Select Component Window" is drawn off screen if the page requires scrolling.
Filtering by a tag containing non-ASCII characters does not work correctly.
Importing more than eight application templates in a single file may result in a Web Console error about having exceeded the maximum message size quota. You can either edit the apm-template file with a text editor and move the excess application templates to another file, or you can re-export the application templates in smaller groupings.
The Microsoft Exchange 2003 application template should not contain the "Disk I/O to log drives" component monitor.
The POP3 User Experience component monitor fails if the user mailbox contains more than 99 messages.
The HTTPS component monitor is not correctly verifying the certificate subject.
The HTTPS component monitor Follow Redirects option is not working correctly.
The reported CPU load is incorrect for Linux SNMP Process component monitors.

Uninstalling APM

If you decide to remove Orion APM from your Orion NPM server, uninstall the Orion APM program files.

To uninstall the Orion APM program files:

Uninstall the module through Add/Remove Programs. The Orion Web Console continues to display the Orion APM module.
Use the service manager (services.msc) to stop the IIS Admin Service, and then manually delete the following folder from your Inetpub directory: \Inetpub\Solarwinds\Orion\APM.
Using the service manager, restart the IIS Admin Service.
Remove the deleted Orion APM resources from your Orion NPM views. If you do not remove them, the Orion Web Console displays System.Web.HttpException errors.
Remove the Orion APM folder from the website folder, typically C:\Inetpub\SolarWinds\Orion\APM. This removes the Application Performance Monitor tab from the Orion Web Console.

Legal

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