Documentation forOrion Platform

Orion Platform 2019.4 Release Notes

Release Date: November 5, 2019

These release notes describe the new features, improvements, and fixed issues in Orion Platform 2019.4. They also provide information about upgrades and describe workarounds for known issues.

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New features and improvements in Orion Platform

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Orion Platform 2019.4 offers new features and improvements compared to previous releases of Orion Platform.

Native SolarWinds Service Desk Integration

Generate Service Desk incidents from Orion Alerts.

» See THWACK post on SWSD integration

» Learn more

Orion Maps enhancements

Entity Library enhancements

  • Filter and refine your entity list based on any property.

  • Bulk-select entities to add them to the canvas.

  • Quickly identify contextual relationships through the entity library without leaving the editor.

Bulk Administration

  • Multi-select from the canvas to move or delete multiple objects in groups.

  • Undo and redo options within the Editor.

Custom Images

  • Add custom images and backgrounds to enhance the map.

Manual Topology Connections

  • Define topology between any two entities directly from the Map Editor.

Customizable map refresh rate

  • From the Advanced Configuration Settings, specify the map refresh rate - in minutes - for the Orion Maps Viewer and Widgets.

    » Learn more

Installation improvements

In-Product evaluations

Add or evaluate additional Orion Platform products from within the Orion Web Console.

Install new products for evaluation even if you are not ready to upgrade your existing Orion Platform products to the latest version. Compatible versions of the new products are installed.

Microsoft Azure

  • Deploy the Orion Platform in the cloud using Azure SQL Database managed instance as an alternative to MS SQL.
  • Deploy the Orion Platform directly from Azure Marketplace

.NET 4.8 support

  • All Orion Platform products now use .NET 4.8.

  • .NET 4.8 is deployed automatically to all Orion Agents for Windows after the upgrade. See a known issue with the first login after the .NET upgrade.

  • All Windows Agent plugins for supported operating systems were migrated.

    Make sure that the operating system of your Orion Platform supports .NET 4.8. See .NET Framework system requirements (© 2019 Microsoft, available at https://dotnet.microsoft.com, obtained on October 3, 2019).

    If your Orion Platform runs on an operating system that does not support .NET 4.8, consider upgrading your environment to be able to use the new features provided by Orion Platform 2019.4.

Other improvements

  • Website performance improvements

  • Scalability Engines Installer download performance improvements

  • Legacy Syslog & Traps replacement: Log Viewer replaces legacy Syslog & Traps with an instant evaluation of Log Analyzer

  • Updated and improved localization of Orion Platform product UI for German and Japanese.

  • Versioning is now consistent across all Orion Platform products; products follow the Orion Platform versioning convention. See the THWACK post What’s in a version number.

  • Orion Platform out-of-the-box reports were migrated to web-based Report Manager

  • Orion SDK enhancements: Automate ‘List Resources’ and import results

  • Review the list of newly supported devices

New customer installation

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For information about installing Orion Platform, see the SolarWinds Orion Installer.

How to upgrade

If you are upgrading from Orion Platform 2016.1 or later, use the SolarWinds Orion Installer to simultaneously upgrade your entire Orion deployment (all Orion Platform products and any scalability engines) to the current versions.

If you are upgrading from Orion Platform 2019.2, you can upgrade your entire Orion deployment from the My Orion Deployment page. Downloading the Orion Installer is no longer necessary.

During the upgrade to Orion Platform 2019.4, all Orion Agents for Windows will be upgraded to .NET 4.8.

If you are upgrading from an earlier Orion Platform version, use this topic to plan and implement an upgrade to the current version of Orion Platform.

Fixed issues in Orion Platform 2019.4

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Orion Platform 2019.4 fixes the following issues.

Case Number Description
292873, 347850 SolarWinds addressed multiple cross-site scripting issues.
  SolarWinds addressed a cross-site scripting issue in maps.
275547 SolarWinds addressed an issue where widgets do not display on the Vital Stats view when modern charts use a custom poller.
256210 SolarWinds addressed an issue where polling engines displayed as up wee not polling due to a memory leak.
205870 [Manage alerts]: SolarWinds addressed an issue where the Manage Alerts page crashes and does not load.
307539, 325032, 336545 SolarWinds addressed issues where upgrades to Orion Platform 2019.2 with time series failed due to non-existing tables (CiscoBuffers_daily, LoadAverage_Daily).

319639, 321553

 SolarWinds addressed an issue where SQL code was using incorrect data types that caused performance issues.
320478 SolarWinds addressed an issue where Custom Property Editor could not populate custom property values.
346466 SolarWinds addressed Orion Web Console performance issues after the upgrade.
233322, 243351, 301464, 302397, 305827, 329065, 331035, 331314, 333144, 333770, 334339, 335647, 336514, 342480, 343026, 349908, 351162 SolarWinds addressed Database Maintenance issues caused by RabbitMQ logs not rotating.
242074, 1180068 World Map: SolarWinds addressed issues with updating longitude and latitude using built-in custom properties.
365386 SolarWinds addressed an issue where Node Child status participation settings were reverted to defaults after applying Orion Platform 2019.2 hotfixes.
351477

SolarWinds addressed an issue where tooltips were displayed in the cached language.
334477, 336613, 337773 SolarWinds addressed an issue where element count for SAM components returns incorrect numbers when federation is on.
283175 SolarWinds addressed a high CPU issue caused by not thread-safe CortexHttpClient.
330908 SolarWinds addressed an issue where database was blocked because of database index issues.
360972 Network Atlas: SolarWinds addressed an issue where vendor icons in the List of Objects were not displayed.
330820, 333843, 334276, 334431, 337568, 337586, 346757 SolarWinds addressed an issue where custom charts were not able to handle a simple SQL data source.
334587 SolarWinds addressed an issue with previewing group details views.
310863, 318535, 347470 SolarWinds addressed an issue where Database Maintenance failed when SQL server language was different from English.
203949 SolarWinds addressed an issue with Chinese characters displaying incorrectly.
213500, 218945, 277465, 356033, SolarWinds addressed an issue where domain names in account names were ignored (LDAP or NTLM or Negotiate auth).
143746 SolarWinds addressed an issue where users could not edit Global Proxy Settings, causing ServiceNow integration issues.
114953 SolarWinds addressed an issue where the Custom Object widget asynchronous rendering resulted in users not seeing all views according to their rights.
1064543, 1362307 SolarWinds addressed an issue where users without admin rights could not edit values for custom properties with restricted values.
149002, 180192, 258656, 273938, 287221, 288450, 295876, 321400, 327253, SolarWinds addressed an issue with SWIS not staying synchronized with changing subscriptions.
273629 SolarWinds addressed an issue where other users could not see reports created by admin accounts.
243733 SolarWinds addressed an issue where modern charts did not respect the browser language and thus did not display the date in the correct format.
91453, 140774, 140803, 212274, 218248, 263146, 290425 SolarWinds addressed multiple ServiceNow integration issues.
265352 SolarWinds addressed an issue with plain text password in Linux JobEngine plugin.
355646 SolarWinds addressed an issue with the PDF export alert action on Windows Server 2019.
374556 SolarWinds addressed an issue with upgrades failing due to a BigIntOverflow script.
363654, 367938, 373659, 382184 SolarWinds addressed an issue where child nodes remained Unreachable when the enhanced node status calculation was enabled.
210059 SolarWinds addressed an issue where opening List Resources for an invalid entity causes the Orion Platform to hang.

Known issues

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SolarWinds.Core.BusinessLayer.dll security vulnerability in Orion Platform 2019.4 Hotfix 5

Issue: An exposed vulnerability in the SolarWinds.Core.BusinessLayer.dll in Orion Platform 2019.4 Hotfix 5.

Work-around:

For details, see the SolarWinds Security Advisory page and the article Address the SolarWinds.Core.BusinessLayer.dll security vulnerability.

 

.NET 4.8 Agent Issues

Issue: When the Windows servers with Orion Agents are upgraded to Orion Platform 2019.4, the .NET Framework on Agent machines is also upgraded to 4.8. The next time the Agent machine is rebooted, you may notice a slight delay attempting to log in to that machine immediately after the reboot. This is due to the .NET Framework 4.8 completing its installation. Under rare circumstances, Windows may prompt you to reboot the machine again.

When upgrading the Orion Platform, the .NET installation file of about 115 MB is sent to each Agent machine. In sensitive environments, this might cause issues. Upgrading multiple agents might take up to a few hours.

Work-around 1: Upgrade .NET Framework on Windows servers with Orion Agents to 4.8 before you start upgrading the Orion Platform to 2019.4.

Work-around 2: Disable upgrading Orion Agents prior to upgrading 2019.4. This may cause agents not to function property until they are upgraded, but this way, you will be able to upgrade to 2019.4 without Agent servers upgrading automatically to .NET 4.8.

Orion Web Console might crash due to real-time polling issues

Issue: After the upgrade to Orion Platform 2019.4, real-time polling widgets might occasionally cause the Orion Web Console to crash, due to w3wp service issues.

Work-around 1: Install Orion Platform 2019.4 Hotfix 1 or later.

Work-around 2: Remove the real-time polling widgets.

  1. Restart IIS on the server hosting the Orion server.
  2. Log in to the Orion Web Console.
  3. Go to Settings > All Settings > Manage Views.
  4. Select Node Details - Vital Stats, remove the CPU Load and Memory Usage - Real Time Data widget, and click Done.
  5. Select Interface Details - Summary, remove the Percent Utilization - Real Time Data widget, and click Done.

Legal notices

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