Congratulations on your purchase of SolarWinds Orion Application Performance Monitor. Application Performance Monitor (APM) allows you to create and monitor your own custom collection of monitored components, providing an open field of opportunity to the network engineer. Built on the proven capabilities and solid architecture of Orion, you know your current needs will be met and, as your needs grow, the Orion platform and Orion APM module will scale with you.

Application Performance Monitor (APM) replaces the Application Monitor (AM) module for Orion. APM provides all the functionality of AM and builds upon it, delivering focused application monitoring for network engineers. With APM you can focus monitoring on your core services while easily ensuring application outages do not originate from the network. APM provides the following features to help:

• Network service monitoring
• General TCP port monitoring
• WMI and SNMP process monitoring
• Service monitoring
• User experience monitoring using HTTP or HTTPS content checking

These monitoring capabilities, along with easily-configured alerting, current and historical reporting, and a customizable web-based interface, make Application Performance Monitor the easiest choice to make for your port, service, and application monitoring needs.

Why Install APM?

APM v1.0 extends the monitoring capabilities of Orion, enhancing its ability to manage Windows, Unix and Linux servers with monitoring the performance of network services, application ports, services, processes, and web user experience.

Application Performance Monitor (APM) can run concurrently with your current installation of the Application Monitor module, but APM is a more robust addition to the Orion platform that includes the capabilities of AM and takes application monitoring much further.

Advanced Server and Process Monitoring

Orion monitors Windows, UNIX, and Linux servers for availability, response time, packet loss, traffic, errors, CPU load, memory utilization, available disk space and more. APM v1.0 extends this capability to monitoring running Windows services and process availability, instance count, memory usage, and CPU utilization through SNMP or WMI.

Network Service and TCP Port Monitoring

Provides monitoring of availability and responsiveness of critical network services and applications.

• Custom TCP Port
• DNS over TCP
• DNS over UDP
• FTP
• HTTP
• HTTPS
• IMAP4
• POP3
• SMTP
• NNTP

Web User Experience Monitoring

Simulates the experience of a user visiting a web page and viewing HTML content. Allows specification of query strings in the URL to monitor dynamic web pages.

• Web over HTTP with optional content check of HTML page
• Web over HTTPS with optional content check of HTML page

Template-based Monitoring Configuration

Allows custom grouping of different monitors and their settings into Application Templates that can be applied against multiple servers simultaneously and shared with other Orion installations and the SolarWinds Thwack community.

Enterprise-ready Management Infrastructure

Leverages the mature Orion management platform

• Leverages the Orion advanced alerting engine for built-in and custom application alerts
• Delivers out-of-the-box application availability and performance reports
• Employs the Orion Report Writer for building custom reports
• Uses the Orion scalable database and Web Console

Installing this Version

If you have a beta version of Application Performance Monitor, you need to uninstall the beta and delete the beta database before installing the release version of APM. If you have a release candidate of APM, you do not need to uninstall your previous version to install the release version of APM.

Warnings:

• The APM web console must be able to communicate with the polling engine on TCP port 17605. If you are within a secured network, make sure the polling engine is reachable on port 17605.
• You must first install version 8.5 SP3 or higher of Orion Network Performance Monitor if you want to install this version of Application Performance Monitor.
• Orion Network Performance Monitor, including the Application Performance Monitor module, does not support the use of case-sensitive database servers.
• Whenever you install a new module or upgrade Orion Network Performance Monitor, ensure you first back up your database.

Note:

If you are installing Application Performance Monitor 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 Application Performance Monitor installer. For more information, see "Installing Application Performance Monitor" in the SolarWinds Orion Application Performance Monitor Administrator Guide.

Migrating to Another Server

If you need to move your Orion server to another physical hardware platform and the server includes 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 APM and reenter your passwords. Encryption of the passwords is local to the Orion server on which APM is installed.

If the name of the Orion server has changed, you must also open each application template and resubmit it: click Submit on the Edit Template page for each. This will update the name of the Orion server in the job scheduler, allowing the job engine to communicate with the APM module engine again.

Vista and Windows Server 2008 and WMI Monitors

You must configure WMI on Vista and Windows Server 2008 to ensure APM WMI monitors can access the computer. SolarWinds created a Technical Reference to aid you in this configuration. For more information, see "Configuring WMI on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 for Application Performance Monitor."

Changing IP Addresses and SNMP credentials

When you select a node to monitor with your application template, a scheduled job is created that contains the IP address of the node and the encrypted SNMP credentials. If the IP address or the SNMP credentials change within Orion, you need to open the application template and resubmit it. Submitting the application template will update the IP address and credentials for the job.

SNMP Monitor Memory Leak

There is a memory leak in the SNMP monitor. If the server on which you install APM responds slowly and you have a number of SNMP monitors, complete the following procedure to release the memory:

To stop the SolarWinds.JobEngineWorker.exe:

1. Start Windows Task Manager.
2. Select SolarWinds.JobEngineWorker.exe on the Processes tab.
3. Click End Process. The process will automatically restart.

HTTP and HTTPS Monitor Issues

The following issues are known and are being researched:

• Entering <Text in the search string for an HTTP or HTTPS monitor will result in a validation error that includes the following text: A potentially dangerous Request.Form was detected from the client. Avoid the <Text string in your user experience search strings.
• If an HTTP or HTTPS monitor is showing unknown, check that you are using the correct port. Sometimes HTTP and HTTPS monitors show an unknown status instead of the down status when the port is incorrect.
• When specifying a certificate subject, the only allowable separators are the space ( ) and the comma (,). Semicolons, commas with spaces after them, and newline or carriage returns are not acceptable separators.

Service Monitors Unknown when Down

If the polling timeout is less than 30 seconds and the node is unreachable, Service monitors sometimes show an unknown status instead of the down status.

Account Limitations

Account limitations are ignored and Orion displays APM alert and event data in the following page and resource:

• Alerts on Triggered Alerts for All Network Devices (page)
• Event data in the Event Summary on Orion Network Summary Home (resource)

Chart Issues

Chart resources provided with APM do not respect changes made on the Web Console Settings page found by clicking Admin on the toolbar. You can change APM chart resources by clicking Edit in the particular resource.

Alert Issues

The following issues surrounding alerts have been identified and are being researched:

• Active APM alerts are not displayed in the Active Alerts resource on the Orion Network Summary Home page. While this issue persists, use the APM Summary View to track active APM alerts.
• When you trigger alerts using a custom poller, the Application Details view may display the following error: Conversion failed when converting the varchar value '983f5860-02c6-4b8d-a5f8-29c30635d254' to data type int. The value will be different, as it will be a GUID associated with the custom poller. Remove the Alert Resource from the Application Details view or disable the custom poller alert.
• The date-time stamps are currently displayed in UTC, which equates to greenwich mean time. For example, if you are in the United States central time zone, alerts show the current time plus 6 hours: 12noon is displayed as 6pm. You can use the general variable ${AlertTriggerTime}, though APM-specific time variables are in UTC, including $(LastTimeUp}.

Filter Issues

The following issues surrounding filters have been identified and are being researched:

• The Filter field on the Top XX resources added with APM does not allow more than 60 characters.
• Filters that include single quotes will not work. You must replace single quotes with dual single quotes. For example, replace Nodes.Vendor='Windows' with Nodes.Vendor=''Windows''. If you navigate back to this window after submitting the filter, you must replace the single quotes with dual single quotes again. Dual single quotes are automatically replaced with single quotes, breaking your filter.

Not All Alert Triggers

The NOT ALL option for triggers, that is, Trigger Alert when NOT ALL of the following apply, does not work correctly. Triggers created with this logic should trigger when any of the arguments is false.

Application Template Importing

The following issues have been discovered surrounding application template importing and are being researched:

• Importing more than 8 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 text editor and move the excess application templates to another file, or you can re-export the application templates in smaller groupings.
• Typing any text on the Import Application Template page causes Cancel not to execute. Remove the text from the field, then click Cancel.
• Typing an incorrect path on the Import Application Template page and clicking Submit results in no action and no warnings. Correct the path to your template, and then click Submit.
• Submitting an empty field on the Import Application Template page results in your being redirected to the Application Templates page without an explanation.

Report Issues

The following issues involving reports are being researched:

• Selections made on the Report Grouping tab of the Report Writer application are not respected by APM reports.
• To ensure your default APM reports are available on your Additional Web Console install, copy the Reports folder to your Additional Web Console server. By default, you can find the Reports folder in \Program Files\SolarWinds\Orion.

Job Engine and Scheduler Issues

The following job engine and scheduler issues are known. Fixes are being researched for inclusion in a future release.

• When database connectivity is lost, the SolarWinds Orion Job Scheduler service continues to run though a fatal error is reported for the scheduler thread in the SolarWinds.JobEngineService.txt log. You can find this log file in the \Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Solarwinds\Orion directory. Stop and restart the SolarWinds Orion Job Scheduler service to fix the issue.
• If you reconfigure the Orion Web Console with the Configuration wizard after installing APM, after reconfiguring the Web Console, run the Configuration wizard again. It will reconfigure the Orion Job Engine, also. If you do not reconfigure the Orion Job Engine, the website will not launch and the following message is displayed: The Web Console is unable to communicate with the APM Service Engine.
• After restarting a 64-bit Windows 2003 Server with APM installed, you may need to manually restart the SolarWinds Orion Job Engine.

Uninstalling APM

If you decide to remove APM from your Orion server, uninstall the APM program files, and then remove the SolarWinds Orion Job Engine and Scheduler services.

To uninstall the APM program files:

1. Uninstall the module through Add/Remove Programs. The Orion Web Console continues to display the Application Performance Monitor module.
2. 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.
3. Using the service manager, restart the IIS Admin Service.
4. Remove the deleted APM resources from your Orion views. If you do not remove them, the Orion Web Console displays System.Web.HttpException errors.

The SolarWinds Orion Job Engine and the SolarWinds Orion Job Scheduler services remain in the Service Control Manager (services.msc).

To remove the SolarWinds Orion Job Engine and the SolarWinds Orion Job Scheduler services:

1. Type the following command at the command line: sc delete SolarWindsJobEngine, and then press Enter.
2. Type sc delete SolarWindsJobScheduler, and then press Enter.

If the services are in use, they will be deleted at the next reboot.

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