Revised: 8/12/2009

Installing

Legal

These release notes provide additional guidance for SolarWinds Orion Application Performance Monitor (Orion APM) version 3.0.

Installing this Version

Orion APM version 3.0 requires Orion Network Performance Monitor (Orion NPM) version 9.5 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.
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

If you have additional Orion APM pollers or Web Consoles, upgrade them at the same time as your Orion APM server.

Upgrading Orion APM

Log on to your Orion APM server as a Windows administrator.
Run the Orion APM 3.0 installer on the server.
Repeat this procedure for any additional Orion APM pollers or Web Consoles.

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. To recover your credentials after migrating the database, follow the procedure in this Knowledgebase article or re-enter the credentials on the Orion APM Credential Library page.

Enabling Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

Many Orion APM templates continue 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 v3.0 contains the following improvements:

Automatic application discovery

Orion APM can scan a selected set of nodes and automatically assign templates to the ones that pass a component matching threshold.
Notes:

Only one application discovery can run at a time.
We try the credentials for each template in the order they appear against multiple servers. An incorrect password may lock out your account depending on your security policy settings.
To save you time, we recommend you keep your application discovery sets small. It is easy to build an application discovery set that tests a lot of templates against a lot of nodes, and a large scan may take a while to finish.

Browse, search, import, and publish thwack application templates directly from the product

The Import and Publish functions require you to have valid thwack credentials. Get thwack credentials from http://thwack.com.
Imported templates are tagged "Imported from thwack".
Requires HTTP access from the Orion APM server to thwack.com and thwack.api.solarwinds.com
thwack data is cached. New thwack data is retrieved every 30 minutes.
thwack metadata about a template's title and description can be changed externally from thwack.com, and may differ from the template contents.

Unmanage applications

You can temporarily suspend alerts and status for applications by unmanaging them. Specify the unmanaged application time frame, and the application is suspended for the duration. Additionally, applications for unmanaged nodes are also placed into an unmanaged state for the duration of the unmanaged node time frame.

Disable components

You can now disable unwanted component monitors instead of deleting them. Disabled components do not count against your license count, and are hidden on the view pages. Template settings inheritance still applies to any component monitors disabled within a template, and the disabled state propagates to any assigned application monitors.

Warns on duplicate assignments

You are warned if you try to assign the same template to a node twice.

Three levels of grouping in All Applications resource

The group level capabilities have been expanded from one level of detail to three.

Filtering in All Applications resource

Filters are optional and can be used to limit the list of Nodes displayed. The filter criteria are specified in a SQL-like syntax similar to the Orion NPM resource filtering.

New application alert variables

New variables let you add more detail to your alert messages.

${ComponentsWithStatus} - lists all components and their current status
${ComponentsWithProblems} - lists any components in a down, unknown, warning, or critical state
${Threshold-CPU-Critical}
${Threshold-CPU-Warning}
${Threshold-PhysicalMemory-Critical}
${Threshold-PhysicalMemory-Warning}
${Threshold-ResponseTime-Critical}
${Threshold-ResponseTime-Warning}
${Threshold-Statistic-Critical}
${Threshold-Statistic-Warning}
${Threshold-VirtualMemory-Critical}
${Threshold-VirtualMemory-Warning}

New Solarwinds licensing

The new Solarwinds licensing affords several advantages:

allows customers to activate an evaluation version of Solarwinds software without having to reinstall a special licensed version of the same software
allows customers to use temporary license keys to extend evaluation periods
allows SolarWinds to roll out new tools and major releases without requiring license activation

Local templates search

Searches templates for key words in the template names, descriptions, tags, and components.

Tooltips – Nodes and Applications

Browse Wizard now has pages for faster access

More time periods in charts

Ability to add charts to custom HTML resources

Top XX by Statistic resource

Application Availability resource

New Monitors

SNMP OID Monitor - only supports numeric values
File Age Monitor - statistic: hours since the file was last modified
File Count - statistic: number of files found
Directory Count - statistic: size of all files in the directory
Performance Counter - Uses RPC instead of WMI. Requires port 445. Similar to running perfmon and selecting counters from a remote computer.
Tomcat 5.x and 6.x Server Monitor - Polls Tomcat status page at http://${IP}/manager/status
LDAP User Experience - statistic: number of matches
DHCP User Experience
WMI Monitor - formerly called WMI Performance Counter Monitor, it accepts any valid WQL query

New Templates

Lotus Domino Servers
Blackberry Enterprise server
Blackberry Delivery Confirmation
Cisco Call Manager
Windows Printer
Citrix template
SharePoint
Multiple Exchange 2007 (for different server roles)
MySQL template
Tomcat 5.x and 6.x template

Open Issues in this Release

This release of Orion APM includes the following open issues:

The HTTPS component monitor is not correctly verifying the certificate subject.
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 reported CPU load is incorrect for Linux SNMP Process component monitors.
The HTTPS component monitor Follow Redirects option is not working correctly.
An error is displayed when adding application resources to the Component Details page.
Case-sensitive databases are not supported.
The X-axis on charts is incorrect after setting a custom time period.
The Y-axis on charts is incorrect for WMI monitors with negative statistics values.
Network Atlas incorrectly displays disabled components.

Fixed Issues in Orion APM Version 3.0

This release of Orion APM includes the following fixes and updates:

Help link text is no longer truncated in IE7.0.
The "Top 10 Processes by CPU Load" resource is no longer missing the "CPU Load" heading.
The "Select Component Window" is no longer drawn off screen if the page requires scrolling.
Non-ASCII tags now work as filters.
An invalid component monitor was removed from the Microsoft Exchange 2003 application template.
The POP3 User Experience component monitor no longer fails if the user mailbox contains more than 99 messages.

Fixes in Previous Releases

Previous releases of Orion NPM include the following fixes:

Version 2.5

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.

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.

Legal

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