Documentation forServer & Application Monitor

SAM 2020.2 Release Notes

Release date: June 4, 2020

Updated September 30, 2020

These release notes describe new features, improvements, and fixed issues in SolarWinds SAM 2020.2. They also provide information about installation, upgrades, and workarounds for known issues.

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New features and improvements in SAM

Read this section to learn about new features and improvements offered in this release, including:

Out-of-the-box API Poller templates

Get up-to-speed with the API Poller feature quickly with predefined templates that capture metrics for PaaS, IaaS, on-premises, and hybrid environments from Microsoft Azure, VMware, and Atlassian products. Tighten the integration between SolarWinds products in your environment with templates specifically designed for AppOptics, Pingdom, and Service Desk.

Similar to SAM's traditional application monitor templates, you can assign templates to nodes, configure settings, and begin monitoring metrics immediately. The difference is that, instead of monitoring applications on target servers, you're monitoring metrics directly from available REST APIs. To learn more, see the SAM API Poller Template Guide.

API Poller improvements

In addition to API Poller templates, the API Poller feature was updated to include support for:

  • Applying OAuth 2.0, Bearer Token, and API Key authentication.
  • Skipping SSL certificate validation, for additional flexibility.
  • Setting custom polling intervals. (The default interval is 2 minutes.)
  • Using macros and node-based custom properties in API request URLs.
  • Using Orion Platform web proxy settings in API requests.
  • Chaining multiple requests so you can quickly set up robust API Pollers that retrieve data from several endpoints.

You can also monitor the status and response times of API calls. In the last release, that data could be displayed but not monitored directly.

WinRM-based application monitor polling for increased scalability

As detailed here, WinRM is now the default transport method used to collect data for WMI-based component monitors (such as Performance Counter Monitors) in SAM templates and application monitors. Using WinRM instead of RPC/DCOM for WMI queries can increase SAM's scalability while collecting the same data with higher reliability and in less time.

If you're building a new environment with SAM 2020.2, WinRM application monitor polling is enabled for the Orion server, Windows-based network nodes added to the Orion Platform, and WMI component monitors automatically. If upgrading from an earlier version, see Configure WinRM polling in your SAM environment to learn how to start leveraging this functionality.

This polling innovation can help you achieve a 4-fold improvement in scalability, as shown in this excerpt from the SAM section of the Scalability Engine Guidelines for SolarWinds products:

SAM Scalability Engine Guidelines excerpt
Stackable polling engines

If using the unified SAM license key (SAM 2020.2 and later) with node-based licensing, polling engine licenses are stacked automatically. You can monitor up to 40,000 component monitors per server at standard polling frequencies. When you exceed that limit, polling intervals are automatically extended.

With component-based licensing, 2 polling engines can be installed on a single server. Stacking is supported.

For details, see the SAM licensing model.

 
Remote Office Poller Yes  

Main Polling Engine limits

With node-based licensing, 40,000 component monitors per polling engine at standard polling frequencies.

With component-based licensing, ~8-10K component monitors per polling engine

25 — 50 concurrent Orion Web Console users

Scalability options

For SAM 2020.2 and later, with node-based licensing:

  • 1 Main Polling Engine (up to 10K component monitors) and up to 100 APEs.
  • 1 APE for every ~40K component monitors at no extra licensing cost. APE licenses are stacked automatically; scalability is built-in with node-based licensing.
  • Up to 550K component monitors.

For SAM 2020.2 and later, with component-based licensing:

  • 1 polling engine for every 10K monitors and up to 100 APEs. Stacking is supported.
  • Up to 550K component monitors.

For SAM 2019.4.x and earlier:

  • 1 polling engine for every ~8-10K component monitors with a maximum of 150K component monitors per primary SAM installation (1 Main Polling Engine and 14 APEs).

To extend beyond these component monitor capacities and surface additional monitored data in a single pane of glass, consider purchasing SolarWinds Enterprise Operations Console.

Additional SAM 2020.2 improvements

Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 was added back to the Orion server for SAM 6.7 customers who want to upgrade to the latest version. SQL Server 2012 support on the Orion database server is also available, as listed in the SAM 2020.2 System Requirements.

New features and improvements in Orion Platform 2020.2

Some of the new features and improvements provided in Orion Platform 2020.2 include:

To learn more, see the Orion Platform 2020.2 release notes.

New customer installation

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Use the Orion Installer, available in the Customer Portal, to install SAM. See the Orion Platform Products Installation and Upgrade Guide for details. After installation, see the SAM Getting Started Guide to learn about configuring and customizing SAM.

Before you upgrade

To prepare for the upgrade:

  1. Read these Release Notes.
  2. Confirm that all servers comply with SAM 2020.2 System Requirements.
  3. (Optional) Back up any custom code, such as modified SolarWinds .css files or added .js files. Click here for tips.

If upgrading from a previous version, note the following details:

  • Starting in SAM 2020.2, the Orion Log Viewer (OLV) replaces the legacy Syslog and Trap Viewers.
  • AppInsight for Active Directory uses port 3268 to collect trust data for Global Catalog (GC) servers. If a GC uses port 3269, update that setting in the application monitor assigned to the domain controller. See Configure AppInsight for Active Directory on nodes.
  • The Application Dependencies feature is disabled during upgrades to prevent performance issues in large environments. To restart polling later, enable the Application Dependencies feature.
  • If you exceed recommended cloud monitoring limits and receive a 503 Service Unavailable error when adding Azure accounts, click here for a workaround.
  • To monitor Exchange Server 2016 and later, install PowerShell 2.0 or later and provide local Administrator rights. See Using PowerShell in SAM.
  • If monitoring containers in your SAM environment:
    • Rebuild containers after upgrading and then add them back. Click here for details.
    • The Kubernetes (K8s) script included in the Orion Platform was updated for K8s v1.16. To obtain a script designed for an earlier K8s version, see this Success Center article.
  • If you upgrade to a localized version of SAM, all templates with new versions that support localization will be replaced. Back up any SAM templates and application monitors modified with custom changes. You cannot roll back to English after installing the Orion Platform in another language.

  • Due to end-of-support by Microsoft for Basic Authentication connections to Exchange Online APIs, the following templates were deprecated in SAM 2020.2. Consider using API poller templates designed for Microsoft 365 instead, as described in the SAM API Poller Template Guide.

    • Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online
    • Microsoft Office 365 Mobile Device Management
    • Microsoft Office 365 Portal
    • Microsoft Office 365 Subscription
  • The following Citrix templates were deprecated in SAM 2020.2 but are still available in THWACK. Click here for the latest Citrix templates, including the Citrix Hypervisor template that replaces the Citrix XenServer template.
    • Citrix PVS Accelerator for XenServer
    • Citrix XenApp 5.0 Core WMI Counters
    • Citrix XenApp 5.0 ICA Session WMI Counters
    • Citrix XenApp 5.0 Presentation Server WMI Counters
    • Citrix XenApp 5.0 Services
    • Citrix XenServer
  • The Orion Server 2017.3 and SolarWinds Failover Engine templates were replaced by Orion Server 2020.2 templates. Deprecated templates are still available in THWACK and legacy SAM installations running Orion Platform 2017.3 — 2019.4.

SolarWinds recommends checking THWACK periodically for updates to SAM's out-of-the-box (OOTB) templates. Apart from AppInsight templates, SAM doesn't update templates automatically during upgrades to avoid overwriting custom changes you may have made. For details, see Import and export SAM templates.

How to upgrade

Use the SolarWinds Orion Installer to upgrade your entire Orion deployment (all Orion Platform products and any scalability engines). See Install or upgrade Orion Platform products.

In SAM 6.9 or later, you can upgrade your entire Orion deployment from the My Orion Deployment page (Settings > My Orion Deployment). Downloading the Orion Installer is no longer necessary.

If you need to migrate SAM as part of your upgrade, see the Orion Platform Migration Guide.

Fixed issues in SAM 2020.2

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Case Number Description

00231880, 00245672, 00293381, 00060419, 00064394, 00066922,

Code was updated so you can "unmanage" application pools and websites on nodes being monitored by AppInsight for IIS.

00431006

 After upgrading to SAM 2019.4, Linux component monitors intermittently returned an Unknown status and “Cannot connect to SSH service. Timeout occurred due to inactivity.” messages appeared in SAM debug logs. Related external libraries were updated.

N/A

The following templates were updated on THWACK. For environments installed using SAM 2019.4 or earlier, you can import updates from within the Orion Web Console. New installations include the latest SAM templates by default.

00348918, 00294195, 00397504, 00415476, 00414695, 00433726

 JMX monitoring was updated to support OpenJDK 13 and improve functionality of the following templates: GlassFish (JMX), IBM WebSphere, JBoss (JMX), and Oracle WebLogic (JMX).

00342071

 The Oracle WebLogic (JMX) template now supports WebLogic 12.2.1.3.0. If upgrading from an earlier version of SAM, you can import the latest version of this template from THWACK.

00494562, 00486598, 00481898, 00489918, 00508707, 00519538

 Min/Max Average Response Time charts display data on Component Details and Application Details views, resolving an issue found in SAM 2019.4.

N/A

 SAM handles "escape" single quote placeholders properly, resolving the issue documented here.

00418981, 00283844

 Code was updated to resolve SQL errors due to non-English characters in Windows group names, as described here.

00535754

 The MIN/Max Average I/O Read Operations Per Sec widget displays data monitored by AppInsight for Exchange.

00536194

 Widgets display data appropriately in the ODBC User Experience Monitor Details view.

00535933

 Network Discovery detects agents on nodes without "object reference not set to an instance of an object" messages.

00529179

 The WMI Monitor displays Namespace data correctly.

00521750

 Timeout were adjusted to prevent APM Business Layer and Collector crashes that impacted device status updates and unreachable components for application monitors.

00470959, 00461333, 00465812, 00472685

 Code was updated so data populates properly in AppInsight for IIS widgets after upgrading SAM.

00469303

 The API Poller feature was updated to support Orion proxy server settings in API requests.

00421569, 00379147

 SolarWinds SWIS code was updated to correct Application Dependency mapping issues.

00457492, 00427647, 00333300, 00377655

The new WinRM application polling feature improves database performance for Active Directory and should help resolve issues related to SQL locks, full transaction logs, timeouts when exporting custom properties, and database maintenance.

See also Orion Platform 2020.2 release notes and Orion Platform hotfix release notes.

Known issues

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AppInsight for Active Directory applications appear Down after disabling the Total Counters feature.

Issue: Replication polling requires a DNS or SysName value to compute replication for a destination domain controller FQDN name, but nodes configured for ICMP polling do not provide this data. As a result, AppInsight for Active Directory widgets may not reflect the actual status of ICMP nodes. Another impact is that replication widgets display IP addresses for ICMP nodes instead of assigned node names.

Workaround: Configure AppInsight for Active Directory nodes as Windows Servers that support both WMI and ICMP polling so that AppInsight for Active Directory widgets can display node status and names properly via WMI. Alternatively, edit the name of an ICMP node on the Node Details > Edit Properties page.

AppInsight for Active Directory performance counters appear as Unknown and may fail during SAM polling.

Issue: AppInsight for Active Directory looks for performance counters in the NT Directory Services (NTDS) category but some domain controllers store performance counters in the Directory Services category, a known Windows issue

Workaround: Rebuild Windows NTDS performance counters. Click here for details.

SQL Server locking causes the Orion database to grow after assigning the AppInsight for Active Directory template to nodes in SAM

Issue: SQL Server locks may occur if you exceed recommended limits for AppInsight for Active Directory monitoring; see Best practices for AppInsight for Active Directory. Locks can prevent rows from being deleted during daily database maintenance jobs, so the number of rows grows as polling continues.

Workaround: Delete rows from the database manually, or remove AppInsight for Active Directory from nodes, wait for daily database maintenance to finish, and then add AppInsight back to the nodes. Click here for details.

SSL Certificate Expiration widget doesn't show certificates for all bindings on IIS servers.

Issue: When AppInsight for IIS monitors a server that has two HTTPS site bindings with the same IP address and port, but different host names and SSL certificates, only the default certificate appears in the SSL Certificate Expiration widget.

Workaround: Assign the SSL Certificate Expiration Date Monitor template to the IIS node to update the SSL date daily. See Assign a template to a node.

Days Remaining value in SSL Certificate Expiration and IIS SSL Certificate Expiration Report widgets are not updated for AppInsight for IIS.

Issue: Polling only occurs once — when AppInsight for IIS is assigned to a node — but does not continue.

Workaround: Assign the SSL Certificate Expiration Date Monitor template to the IIS node to update the SSL date daily. Click here for details.

Container monitoring stops after upgrading from SAM 6.7 or later.

Issue: YAML files need to be refreshed after the upgrade.

Workaround: Rebuild containers. Click here for details.

Component monitor scripts in the AIX template do not execute if "Inherit credentials from node" is selected. This issue can impact CPU statistic, Paging statistic/sec, Percentage of using system devices, Disk operations/sec of system devices, and Top 10 active processes.

Issue: Header issues in Perl script output prevent component monitors from inheriting credentials from nodes, so scripts fail.

Workaround: Edit component monitors to provide credentials, or avoid using "Inherit credentials from node" option for affected component monitors. Click here for details.

Application Dependency polling fails; application dependencies or connections between nodes for Windows Server and other applications do not appear as expected.

Issue: Rows in the dbo.AgentManagement_Agents table that share the same Node ID may cause exceptions.

Workaround: Uninstall agents from nodes, remove duplicate rows in the database, and then reinstall agents. Click here for details.

The PowerShell version of the Server Clock Drift template returns invalid results and the following message: "Scripting Error: Script does not contain the expected parameters or is improperly formatted. 'Statistic' missing."

Issue: This may occur if the clock drift is small negative number, such as -0.001.

Workaround: This issue was fixed in SAM 6.4. If you started with a fresh install of SAM 6.4 or later, you should already have the updated template. If you began using an earlier version of SAM, download the latest version from THWACK here. You can also update the code in existing templates. Click here for details.

The Apache template for Linux always appears Down on RedHat-derived systems, such as CentOS.

Issue: The apache2 process monitor tests if a specific process — apache2 —is running, and reports the CPU and physical memory used by the process. The Apache process name may vary across Linux distributions.

Workaround: Edit the template and modify apache2 references, as necessary.

In the Microsoft Azure App Service application template, the Average Response Time component monitor that provides the average time elapsed for the app to serve requests doesn't work.

Workaround: Either disable the Average Response Time component in the application template, or use the Microsoft Azure App Service API poller template introduced in SAM 2020.2.

Some SAM pages and widgets are not compatible with Internet Explorer (IE) 11.

Issue: Warning messages may appear when using IE 11 with features introduced in SAM 2020.2. SolarWinds recommends using a different browser (such as Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge) for the best SAM experience.

Adding a container service fails with "Missing parameter: hostip" script error and general server error.

Issue: Service Names or Orion Usernames that include hash (#) characters block the generation of scripts used to configure orchestrators for container services.

Workaround: Do not use hash (#) characters in the Service Name or Orion Username fields when adding container services. Click here for details.

Inconsistencies in SAM SQL tables

Issue: After upgrading to SAM 6.9 or later, a known Microsoft issue may create inconsistency in SQL tables, as indicated by a Database Integrity Check message.

Workaround: Back up the Orion database and execute a SQL query provided here.

Windows Scheduled Tasks Monitor (WSTM) polling fails for Active Directory nodes with UPN-formatted credentials.

Issue: If you add the Windows Scheduled Tasks Monitor to an Active Directory node with User Principal Name (UPN) credentials (for example, user@domain.tld, instead of domain.tld\user), polling fails, an "Access is denied" error appears in the Windows Scheduled Tasks widget, and errors appear in logs.

Workaround: Use the down-level logon name format (domain\user) instead of UPN format (user@domain). Click here for details.

High memory utilization for SolarWinds.ServiceHost.Process slows Active Directory (AD) servers monitored by Orion agents.

Issue: The ServiceDirectoryClient component leaks Service Directory client connections due to exceptions that occur when opening the channel.

Workaround: Upgrade to the latest release of SAM or switch polling method for AD servers. Click here for details.

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2-2012 R2 Failover Cluster (Advanced) template fails with errors and node status switches to Down.

Issue: The 64-bit FailoverClusters module conflicts with PowerShell bitness so polling fails.

Workaround: Modify a script included in the templates; click here for details.

Warranty data does not appear after Asset Inventory polling of HPE Proliant servers.

Issue: Recent changes to HP Warranty servers interrupt periodic polling. No workaround is currently available. Click here for details.

Warranty data does not appear after Asset Inventory polling of Dell M1000e or PowerEdge servers.

Issue: Recent changes to the Dell API from which warrant data is collected block polling. No workaround is currently available. Click here for details.

SolarWinds recommends using the Orion agent for Linux to monitor Wildfly (formerly JBoss) systems. However, note that the JMX bridge can be configured to monitor WildFly or JBoss targets, but not both types simultaneously.

Issue: WildFly, formerly known as JBoss, is an application server developed by Red Hat. For details, see Configure JMX monitoring on WildFly servers.

End of life

See the End of Life Policy for details about life cycles for SolarWinds products.

EoL Announcements EoE Effective Dates EoL Effective Dates

June 4, 2020

End-of-Life (EoL) announcement – Customers on SAM 6.6 and SAM 6.7 should begin transitioning to the latest version of SAM.

September 4, 2020

End-of-Engineering (EoE) – Service releases, bug fixes, workarounds, and service packs for SAM 6.6 and SAM 6.7 will no longer be actively supported by SolarWinds.

September 3, 2021

EoL – SolarWinds will no longer provide technical support for SAM 6.6 and SAM 6.7.

July 31, 2019

EoL announcement – Customers on SAM 6.5 should begin transitioning to the latest version of SAM.

December 30, 2019

EoE – Service releases, bug fixes, workarounds, and service packs for SAM 6.5 will no longer be actively supported by SolarWinds.

June 30, 2020

EoL – SolarWinds will no longer provide technical support for SAM 6.5.

March 12, 2019

EoL announcement – Customers on SAM 6.4 should begin transitioning to the latest version of SAM.

June 12, 2019

EoE – Service releases, bug fixes, workarounds, and service packs for SAM 6.4 will no longer be actively supported by SolarWinds.

June 12, 2020

EoL – SolarWinds will no longer provide technical support for SAM 6.4.

April 6, 2018

EoL announcement – Customers on SAM 6.3 should begin transitioning to the latest version of SAM.

June 6, 2018

EoE – Service releases, bug fixes, workarounds, and service packs for SAM 6.3 will no longer be actively supported by SolarWinds.

June 6, 2019

EoL – SolarWinds will no longer provide technical support for SAM 6.3.

See Currently supported software versions for more information.

Legal notices

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