NPM 12.3 Release Notes
Release Date: May 30, 2018
Updated: May 31, 2018
These release notes describe the new features, improvements, and fixed issues in SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor 12.3. They also provide information about upgrades and describe workarounds for known issues.
LEARNING OPPORTUNITY: Tips and Tricks for upgrading to the latest version of NPM. Anyone upgrading to the newest version of NPM will benefit from this training.
For NPM environment requirements, see NPM 12.3 System Requirements.
- New features and improvements in NPM
- New features and improvements in Orion Platform 2018.2
- Before you upgrade
- Fixed issues in NPM 12.3
- Legal notices
New features and improvements in NPM
Read this section for descriptions of the new features and improvements NPM offers in this release, or compare NPM 12.3 with previous releases of NPM.
NPM 12.3 is an Orion Platform product, and runs on Orion Platform 2018.2.
Network Insight for Nexus devices
Get insight into the health of your Nexus devices:
- Monitor data center switch health and readiness.
- Get virtual Port Channel (vPC) visibility.
- Easily search by interface description with filtered list views.
Remove stale interfaces
Configure NPM to automatically delete interfaces with no new data polled in a specified period.
New features and improvements in Orion Platform 2018.2
Scale improvements
- Support for 100 Additional Polling Engines in a single instance (400% increase over previous releases)
- Support monitoring up to 400,000 elements in a single instance (4 x more than in previous releases)
Load Average metrics collected from Linux-based devices
When polling CPU & Memory with the Orion agent, selected metrics are available for alerts, alert variables, charts, reports, PerfStack(TM), and SWIS.
Improved group member statistics
Use the new metric showing group availability by averaging the availability of the internal group members instead of using the status of the entire group. You can use this metric in a new widget, in alerts, reports, and in PerfStack dashboards.
Orion Maps
Orion Maps is an is an advanced troubleshooting tool that provides a contextual and graphical portrayal of an entity and its critical relationships, including routers, switches, servers, interfaces, volumes, and groups. It visualizes physical and logical relationships between entities, leveraging Network Performance Monitor’s Topology, Server & Application Monitor Application Dependencies, and other relationship information to quickly isolate and identify critical health and performance issues easily.
PerfStack widget
Add saved Performance Analysis project to any view as a widget. Just click the Edit view icon > Add widgets, search for the project name, and drag the widget to its position.
Other improvements
- For modules that monitor UPS power supplies, UPS monitoring for APC (American Power Conversion) SmartUPS Uninterruptible Power Supplies containing Network Management cards.
- Updated popovers:
- Up to five custom properties can be configured to display in node popovers
- Updated SolarWinds Orion Installer with improved scalability engine installation experience
- Added support for over 70 vendors and 5000 devices.
- Added support for Apresia (CPU, memory, icon, MIBs for traps and Huawei devices (CPU and memory)
- SNMPv3 support for Huawei and other RFC3414 devices
- Support Orion cloud deployment in Amazon EC2 and Azure VM
- Support for utilizing Amazon RDS for Orion Database
- Orion Platform modules no longer require MSDTC
- Modules no longer require TLS 1.0 or 1.1 be enabled on the Orion Server
- Microsoft Device Guard Support (all binaries properly signed)
Hotfix info
SolarWinds Orion Installer for installing Orion Platform 2018.2 already includes the Orion Platform 2018.2 Hotfix 1.
Before you upgrade
For information about installing SolarWinds NPM, see the multi-product SolarWinds Orion Installer guide.
If you are upgrading from a previous version, be aware of the following considerations:
Review the deprecation notices: Although NPM 12.3 supports Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, and SQL Server 2012, these will no longer be supported in future versions.
How to upgrade
Use the SolarWinds Orion Installer to upgrade one or more Orion Platform products simultaneously.
Fixed issues in NPM 12.3
NPM 12.3 fixes the following issues.
| Case number | Description |
|---|---|
|
1213238, 1213854 |
ASA devices are polled using CLI without issues. |
|
1321152, 1335554, 1357372 |
Monitored port types are displayed correctly. |
|
1238971, 1243927, 1243261, 1253601, 1329251, 1234389, 1239506, 1259459, 213238, 1288092, 1294367, 1314692 |
ASA polling issues caused by ASA plugin issues have been resolved. |
|
1217719 |
The VPN Site-to-Site tunnels view correctly displays VPN tunnels. |
|
1237412, 1315098, 1302188, 1256081, 1267165, 1316095,1301930, 1334890, 1242919, 1263093, 1259205, 1242919 |
Remote access VPN tunnels are displayed in the Remote Access subview of Node Details for ASA. |
|
1016903, 1089596, 1090051, 1104091, 1106433, 1184601, 1011108, 1100070, 1151886, 1175356, 1219018 |
When creating switch stack alerts, you can select objects for simulating trigger actions and execute the alerts without issues. |
|
1359827, 1336635 |
Remote access tunnels are displayed correctly, not multiple times. |
|
1233817, 1209296 |
NetPath: when adding egress interface duplicate edges are not generated. This resolves Netpath errors in events and logs. |
|
1239012, 1128650, 1185571 |
Memory leak caused by the integration of NetPath and NTA has been resolved. |
|
1141386 |
Performance issues caused by long running queries have been resolved. |
|
1122221 |
Trap-types are correctly converted to notification types. |
|
881138 |
The Percent Utilization chart for interfaces loads even if there is much data to display. |
|
1217727 |
Only configured VPN Site-to-Site tunnels are polled. |
|
1280437, 1088717, 1109439, 1061929, 1158713, 1185099 |
You can import Device Studio pollers from thwack even though you are using a web proxy. |
|
1235245 |
You can use large backgrounds for wireless heat maps. |
|
1361012 |
Tracing data from one node is logged into one file. |
|
1210704, 1338604, 1370287, 1266943, 1299973 |
Interface data updates are published only when the data is changed. |
|
1295378 |
You can edit interface properties on the Edit Interface page for interfaces with many containers and dependencies. |
|
1262876, 1336501, 1338823, 1352361, 1358683, 1357349, 00018816, 1338308, 1326082, 1362491, 1339271, 1341066 |
Hardware health data reported from ASA devices is displayed correctly. |
|
1154975, 1370242, 1257410 |
During upgrades, Configuration wizard successfully migrates the Hardware Health table. |
|
00025167, 1105166 |
When you stop the Database Maintenance in the middle of aggregating Custom Poller data, the next run of the Database Maintenance completes without issues |
|
984861, 1188222, 969275 |
Database Maintenance correctly deletes historical data for interfaces. |
|
1272202 |
You can now see all Site-to-Site tunnels on your ASA devices, including tunnels in Phase2. |
|
1353825, 1352420 |
SNPMv2-MIB trap is identified correctly. |
|
1359885, 1258564 |
All correctly polled results for tunnels are processed, incorrect results are ignored and logged. |
|
1337517, 00030630, 1354224 |
NPM correctly displays tunnels on ASA firewalls. |
|
00022531, 00025419 |
NPM correctly parses context for specific CLI output format. |
|
1131321, 1098439, 1149470, 1189697, 00024073, 00034209, 1179560, 1105609 |
You can assign Universal Device Pollers in the Add Node wizard. |
|
1224105, 1253744, 1272921, 1353569 |
Site-to-Site tunnels are polled correctly because the VPN poller has been improved not to suffer from overflow exceptions. |
|
1337117, 1336807 |
If the Mode column is present in the show context response, all contexts on the ASA device are polled. |
See also Orion Platform 2018.2 Release Notes.
End of life, end of support, deprecation notices
End of life
See End of Life Policy for information about end of life and end of engineering for SolarWinds products.
| EoL Announcements | EoE Effective Dates | EoL Effective Dates |
|---|---|---|
| May 31, 2018:
End-of-Life (EoL) announcement – Customers on NPM version 12.0 should begin transitioning to the latest version of NPM. |
August 31, 2018: End-of-Engineering (EoE) – Service releases, bug fixes, workarounds, and service packs for NPM version 12.0 will no longer be actively supported by SolarWinds. | August 31, 2019: End-of-Life (EoL) – SolarWinds will no longer provide technical support for NPM version 12.0 |
| September 13, 2017:
End-of-Life (EoL) announcement – Customers on NPM version 11.5 should begin transitioning to the latest version of NPM. |
December 17, 2017: End-of-Engineering (EoE) – Service releases, bug fixes, workarounds, and service packs for NPM version 11.5 will no longer be actively supported by SolarWinds. | December 17, 2018: End-of-Life (EoL) – SolarWinds will no longer provide technical support for NPM version 11.5. |
| March 15, 2017
End-of-Life (EoL) announcement – Customers on NPM version 11.0.x should begin transitioning to the latest version of NPM. |
June 15, 2017
End-of-Engineering (EoE) – Service releases, bug fixes, workarounds, and service packs for NPM version 11.0.x will no longer be actively supported by SolarWinds. |
June 15, 2018 End-of-Life (EoL) – SolarWinds will no longer provide technical support for NPM version 11.0.x. |
End of Support
See Currently supported software versions for more information.
For information about supported versions of SolarWinds products, see this article.
Deprecations
Deprecation indicates that the feature should be avoided. Deprecated features remain in the software, but will be removed in a future release. Customizations applied to a deprecated feature may not be migrated if a new feature replaces the deprecated one.
This version deprecates the following hardware, software, and features.
| Type | Deprecation |
|---|---|
| Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2 | This software is deprecated as of this release. Although you can install Orion Platform 2018.2 products on Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 are deprecated and will not be supported in future versions of the Orion Platform. SolarWinds strongly recommends that you upgrade your operating system to Windows Server 2016 or later at your earliest convenience. |
| SQL Server 2012 | This software is deprecated as of this release. Although you can use SQL Server 2012 with Orion Platform 2018.2 products, this version is deprecated and will not be supported on future versions of the Orion Platform. SolarWinds strongly recommends that you upgrade to Microsoft SQL Server 2016, 2017, or later at your earliest convenience. |
| All Active Alerts resource |
The current All Active Alerts resources is deprecated. The resource is replaced with a new, enhanced widget. You can continue to use the deprecated, legacy resource. |
|
Pre-configured resources (Availability, Min/Max/Average, Percent Loss, etc.) |
Most pre-configured resources are deprecated as of this release. The resources will be compressed into single, configurable widget in a future release. |
| Last XX resources | Pre-configured Last XX resources are deprecated as of this release. They will be replaced with a single, configurable widget in a future release. |
| Managed Nodes |
The current Managed Nodes page is deprecated as of this release. A new version is available, but you can continue to use the legacy page. SolarWinds recommends migrating to the new Managed Nodes page at your earliest convenience. |
| Customize Views | The Customize View page is deprecated as of this release. Functionality is migrating to the Customize Page feature. |
|
Search resources (legacy search, search on thwack, search for nodes, etc.) |
All search resources are deprecated as of this release. Use the integrated search in the global navigation. |
Legal notices
© 2018 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.
This document may not be reproduced by any means nor modified, decompiled, disassembled, published or distributed, in whole or in part, or translated to any electronic medium or other means without the prior written consent of SolarWinds. All right, title, and interest in and to the software, services, and documentation are and shall remain the exclusive property of SolarWinds, its affiliates, and/or its respective licensors.
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