Revised: 1/7/2010

Installing

Legal

These release notes provide additional guidance for SolarWinds Orion Application Performance Monitor (Orion APM) version 3.1.

Installing this Version

Orion APM version 3.1 requires Orion Network Performance Monitor (Orion NPM) version 9.5 Service Pack 3 or later, Service Pack 5 is recommended.

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 3.1 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 v3.1 contains the following improvements:

Processes and services in the Application Details view can be sorted: Sorting improves the readability of the resource if you have a large number of processes or services.
Conveniently add nodes from Orion APM or assign templates from Orion NPM: Shortcuts between Orion APM and Orion NPM let you more easily assign templates and add nodes.
Orion APM Additional Polling Engines are now FREE!: You no longer need to purchase a license to add Orion APM polling capabilities to your existing Orion NPM Additional Polling Engines. Use the same installer you used to install Orion APM to install your free Orion APM Additional Polling Engines. For more information, see Installing Additional Pollers in the Orion APM Administrator Guide.
New Windows Event Log monitor and template: The Windows Event Log monitor scans Windows Event Logs and counts the number of recent events matching your defined criteria.
Orion APM built-in templates now use RPC-based Performance Counter monitors: Built-in templates that previously collected performance counter data using the WMI Monitor now instead collect data using RPC-based Performance Counter monitors. Note: If you are upgrading Orion APM, your existing templates will not be modified. Manually update your existing templates using the Performance Counter Conversion Utility (download).
New Count As Difference option in Performance Counter and WMI Monitor components: Instead of storing raw performance counter values as the statistic, you now have the option to compute and store the difference in value between polling cycles.
Persistent dropdown filter selections: Filters now remember your previous settings.
Prevent proxy servers from caching monitored URLS: New "cache-buster" variable ${TimeStamp} prevents proxy servers from caching monitored URLs. Example cache-buster for a simple HTTP Monitor URL:
http://${IP}:${Port}/?_cb=${TimeStamp}
Improved response time calculations for MAPI User Experience Monitor: We changed how we measure response time for the MAPI User Experience monitor to remove Orion APM processing time from the equation.

Open Issues in this Release

This release of Orion APM includes the following open issues:

The Thwack login box is partially clipped in Internet Explorer.
The SWQL filter examples incorrectly use curved single quote marks instead of straight single quote marks (').
Sometimes the installer reports "Invalid Core Configuration value" because a registry key is missing.
No APM Warning events are shown if Event Type is set to APM Warning on the Events view.
The tags "Event Log" and "Event Logs" need to be combined into a single tag in a future release.
The DHCP User Experience monitor allocates actual IP addresses each time it polls and they are not released until the lease time expires.
The LDAP User Experience monitor does not let you view the response time graphs.
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 HTTPS component monitor Follow Redirects option is not working correctly.
The Y-axis on charts is incorrect for WMI monitors with negative statistics values.
Case-sensitive databases are not supported.
Network Atlas displays disabled components as "unknown" instead of hiding them.

Fixed Issues in Orion APM Version 3.1

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

Adding application resources to the Component Details page now works correctly.
SQL queries are no longer limited to a maximum length of 4000 symbols.
SNMP-based monitors are no longer prone to UInt32 errors.
Application scan no longer requires credentials if they are not necessary.
TCP DNS monitor assigned to Linux servers no longer receive "Error DNS Length".
Call Manager SNMP process monitors now work correctly after upgrading Orion APM.
Fixed a memory leak in SWJobSchedulerSvc.exe that caused Performance Counter monitor failures.
Improved the loading speed of the Application List resource to allow Node Details page to load faster.

Fixes in Previous Releases

Previous releases of Orion NPM include the following fixes:

Version 3.0

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.

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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