Alright, look. SolarWinds upgrade. Just typing that gives me a slight headache, and my coffee\’s already cold. Again. It\’s not that the upgrade itself is some mythical beast, but man, between the legacy systems clinging on for dear life, the sheer volume of stuff it touches, and the ever-present fear of breaking that one critical report someone in Finance absolutely needs right now… it’s a special kind of stress. We did ours last quarter. Took weeks longer than the shiny vendor slide deck promised. Found grey hairs I didn\’t have before. But we got through it. Mostly intact. This isn\’t some polished \’10 Easy Steps!\’ nonsense. This is the messy, slightly sweaty reality I lived. Grab another coffee. Or something stronger.
First thing? Don\’t even look at the installer yet. Seriously. Walk away. Your prep work is literally everything. I learned that the hard way years ago when an upgrade tanked because some ancient network monitor probe, forgotten on a dusty server in a closet, was using an authentication method deprecated since the Stone Age. Took us down for hours. Fun times. So now? Inventory. Brutal, tedious inventory. Not just \”we have SolarWinds,\” but what modules? NPM? SAM? NTA? IPAM? The weird custom one Bob built five years ago before he left? What servers host what? What accounts does it use? Where are the damn databases? Document every dependency, every integration point, every custom script, report, view, alert threshold tweak. It’s archaeology, not IT. You’re digging through layers of \’temporary fixes\’ and \’we\’ll revisit that later\’ decisions. Found a server still running Server 2008 R2 hosting a secondary polling engine. Of course we did.
Then comes the compatibility tango. The vendor matrix says your OS is supported? Great. Now check the .NET version. And the SQL Server version. And the exact patch level. And the hardware specs against the new requirements, not what barely limped the old version along. We had a polling engine VM that met the old CPU specs but was laughably underpowered for the new resource demands. Bottlenecked the whole thing after migration until we scrambled more cores. Check your SQL maintenance plans too. That Full backup running at 2 PM? Yeah, it\’ll clash spectacularly with the upgrade process. Schedule? Throw it out the window until you know your bottlenecks.
Backups. Sounds obvious, right? Like, duh. But it’s not just kicking off a SQL backup and calling it a day. You need application-aware backups. Snapshots of the entire server VMs hosting SolarWinds components at the same time as the SQL backups. Database consistency checks run before you back up. Verified restores on a sandbox environment? That’s the gold standard, but honestly, who always has that luxury? We did SQL backups, VM snapshots, and exported every single configuration setting, view, report, custom property – the whole shebang – using the built-in Configuration Wizard. Saved our bacon when a custom report template got mangled. Took hours to export, felt like overkill. Wasn\’t.
Communication. Ugh. The necessary evil. You gotta tell people. Not just \”doing maintenance Saturday,\” but \”your fancy network latency dashboard will be a blank void for approximately 4-8 hours, maybe longer, and alerts might be wonky.\” Be brutally honest about the potential pain. Set expectations low, then hopefully exceed them. We sent emails, posted on the internal IT portal, even stuck a physical note near the NOC screens. Still got three panicked calls from the network team when the primary Orion web console went dark. \”Did you see the email? The portal notice? The giant sign?\” \”Uh… no?\” Sigh.
Test environment. If you have one, bless you. Replicate your production setup as closely as possible, restore your pre-upgrade backups/snapshots onto it, and run the upgrade there first. Test everything. Basic polling? Sure. But also complex dependencies, custom SQL queries for reports, alert triggers, API integrations. We found a critical SAM application monitor failed because the underlying PowerShell script used an old syntax the new module didn’t like. Fixed it in test, saved production meltdown. No test env? Your risk meter just pegged. Seriously consider building a minimal one, even if it\’s just for core components.
D-Day. Or Upgrade-Day. Whatever. Clear your schedule. Tell your family you love them, you might be late. Or early. From the wrong side of dawn. Start early. Have the installer files downloaded, checksums verified (don\’t skip that!), and ready. Run the pre-upgrade checks in the Orion Deployment Manager (ODM). Read the output like it\’s a suspense novel. Any warnings? Fix them. Errors? Abort. Seriously. Don\’t be a hero. We had a warning about low disk space on the log drive for the main polling engine. Ignored it once years ago. Paid dearly. Not this time. Freed up space.
The actual install… it\’s mostly waiting. Clicking \’Next\’ after holding your breath. Watching progress bars crawl. ODM does a decent job orchestrating across multiple servers if you have a distributed setup. But watch the logs. Have the installer logs and the Orion logs open side-by-side. `SolarWinds-Installer-.log` is your friend. And `OrionDebug.log`. Learn their language. \”INFO\” is good coffee time. \”WARNING\” means lean in. \”ERROR\” means panic, then troubleshoot. We hit a weird permissions error halfway through the secondary poller upgrade. Logs pointed to the service account missing a specific local policy right after the installer had modified it. Manually added it back, resumed, carried on. Heart rate: elevated.
Performance. The new version might feel sluggish initially as it re-indexes databases or processes backlogged data. Monitor your server resources – CPU, RAM, Disk I/O on the Orion server and the SQL server. Give it time to settle before declaring it broken. Our SQL Server CPU spiked to 90% for a good hour post-upgrade while it churned through things. Scary, but it calmed down. If it doesn\’t… well, time to dig into SQL performance tuning. Again.
Rollback. The unthinkable, but you must know how. Your pre-upgrade backups and snapshots are your lifeline. Rolling back SolarWinds isn\’t trivial. It usually involves restoring the SQL databases and reverting the server VMs/applications to their pre-upgrade state using snapshots. The order matters! SQL first, then app servers. And it takes time. A lot of downtime. This is why the testing and prep are so damn crucial – to avoid needing this nuclear option. We had the procedure documented, rehearsed in test, and thankfully didn\’t need it. But knowing the escape hatch was there helped me sleep the night before.
So, is it worth it? Honestly? Sitting here now, with the new version running mostly smoothly, with the new features and the security patches? Yeah, probably. The performance insights are better, the new dashboards are slick (once you rebuild the broken ones), and knowing we\’re not running a known vulnerable version helps me sleep slightly better. But the process itself? It\’s a grind. It exposes every shortcut, every undocumented widget, every piece of technical debt your environment carries. It’s exhausting. You’ll question your life choices. You’ll crave silence and a lack of blinking server lights. But you get through it. You learn. You document better (maybe). Until next time. Pass the aspirin.
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