These release notes provide additional guidance for SolarWinds Orion Application Performance Monitor v2.0.

Installing this Version

Orion Application Performance Monitor version 2.0 requires Orion Network Performance Monitor version 9.0 or later.

Warnings:

• The 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 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.

Upgrading

This section provides guidance on upgrading from Orion APM v1.0 and from Orion Application Monitor.

Upgrading from Orion Application Monitor

1. Log on to your Orion NPM server as a Windows administrator.
2. Upgrade your Orion NPM server to Orion NPM version 9.0 or later.
3. Run the Orion APM 2.0 installer on your Orion NPM server.
4. Download and run the AM to APM Migration Utility on your Orion NPM server.
   ftp://ftp.solarwinds.net/unsupported/Orion/SolarWinds.APM.AppMonConverter.zip

Upgrading from Orion Application Performance Monitor v1.0

1. Log on to your Orion NPM server as a Windows administrator.
2. Run the Orion APM 2.0 installer on your Orion NPM server.

Converting APM v1.0 Alerts to APM v2.0

After upgrading to APM v2.0, your existing component-specific alerts will become more generic. For example, a status alert for an HTTP monitor becomes a status alert that is triggered by any component. This is a result of the improvements we have made to the alerts in APM v2.0 to make them less cumbersome to configure.

To make a converted component monitor alert work the same way it did in APM v1.0, edit the alert in Advanced Alert Manager, and add a Component Type is equal to x" condition to the alert, where x matches the appropriate value for the component monitor type.

Migrating to Another Server

If you need to move your Orion NPM 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 Orion APM and reenter your passwords. Encryption of the passwords is local to the Orion NPM server on which Orion APM is installed.

New Features

Orion APM v2.0 contains the following improvements:

AppBuilder Wizard

Orion APM delivers a simple step-by-step wizard that makes it fast and easy to gain visibility into the performance of your servers. To get started, simply enter the IP address of any server on your network and Orion APM will automatically retrieve a list of available statistics to monitor. Next, select the statistics you want to monitor, or choose an Application Monitor Template. Application monitors work on Windows®, Linux, and Unix servers and can include component monitors for services, processes, ports, scripts, and WMI performance counters.

Community Content Library

Leverage the SolarWinds' online community, Thwack, to browse, download, and share application monitor templates and scripts created by other users directly from the Orion APM web interface.

User-Experience Monitors

Includes out-of-the-box monitoring support for HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and other ODBC databases to enable you to measure application performance from an end-user's perspective. This Quality of Experience (QoE) measurement helps ensure your users will be satisfied with the performance of the applications they rely on.

Open Source Script Processor

APM's Open Source Script Processor takes any Nagios script and converts it into a format that APM can schedule, run, and retrieve results. Leverage Nagios scripts available on Thwack, third-party script libraries, or create your own custom script to extend APM's monitoring coverage. With Nagios scripts, APM users can monitor virtually any service such as confirming the completion of daily backups.

Universal WMI Performance Monitors

Orion APM makes it easy for you to remotely monitor any WMI performance counters to identify and resolve application issues before users are impacted. Adding WMI monitors is as simple as clicking on a server icon, browsing its list of available counters, and selecting the ones you would like to add.

Performance Warning System

Orion APM will notify you of imminent or potential failures when pre-configured or user-defined performance thresholds are crossed. Four tiers of thresholds can be established (Good, Warning, Critical, and Down), helping you quickly assess the difference between, for example, a system that is up but performing poorly and a system that is about to fail.

Windows and Linux Script Monitors

If you have written your own Windows, Linux, or Unix scripts to monitor application health indicators that are not available through SNMP or WMI, you can now integrate these into Orion APM. With just a few clicks, you can schedule their execution and report and alert on their output.

Fixed Issues in this Release

This release of Orion APM fixes the following issues:

• Service monitors with short polling timeout values no longer show an unknown status instead of down status.
• Job engine no longer stalls after database connectivity is lost.
• Reconfiguring the website no longer creates a job engine error.
• The SolarWinds Orion Job Engine no longer needs to be manually restarted if APM is restarted on a 64-bit Windows 2003 Server.
• Account limitations are no longer ignored for "Alerts on Triggered Alerts for All Network Devices" or for event data in the "Event Summary on Orion Network Summary Home (resource)".
• Active APM alerts are correctly displayed in the Active Alerts resource on the Orion Network Summary Home page.
• Application details no longer show an error when custom poller alerts are active.
• Alert time stamps are now shown in local time instead of UTC.
• Top XX filters can now be longer than 60 characters.
• Top XX filters can now include single quote characters.

Open Issues in this Release

This release of Orion APM includes the following open issues:

• 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."
• Selections made on the Report Grouping tab of the Report Writer application are not respected by APM reports.
• 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.
• Additional Web Console installs do not include the default 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Charts do not use Orion NPM Web Console settings for 95th percentile calculations.
• TCP DNS monitor does not work with packets larger than 512 bytes.
• WMI Performance Counters monitoring Remote Access statistics on Windows XP nodes sometimes display the following error on the Monitor Details page: WebConsole: Unexpected error occurred. Invalid class error.
• If APM is deployed on a 64-bit host, sometimes monitors go into an unknown status. The error Faulting application SWJobSchedulerSvc.exe may be displayed.
• Script component monitors do not terminate scripts after the timeout expires. Ensure you do not write a script that never finishes.
• The process instance counts for Windows Service, Process Monitor SNMP, and Process Monitor WMI components are reported as -1 instead of 0.
• Reports cannot be correctly filtered by date or time.
• If an SNMP Process Monitor is in a warning or a critical state, it logs an event to the Orion Events Table each time it is polled.
• If the Time field of an APM chart resource is left blank, the web page crashes.
• The data format is not displayed according to Windows regional settings.
• If an SNMP Process Monitor component has a blank warning or critical threshold value, the application status may be Down while the component status is Up.
• In the report "Average Response time of each Component", the values of the max and average response times are not computed correctly.
• Assigning a Windows Script Monitor to a node displays a "Value cannot be null" error. This error is harmless.
• The Oracle User Experience Monitor components of the Oracle Database (APM 2.0) template erroneously show a "WindowsAuthentication" field. Ignore this field.

Uninstalling APM

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

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.
5. Remove the APM folder from the website folder, typically C:\Inetpub\SolarWinds\Orion\APM. This removes the APM tab from the Orion Web Console.

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