Documentation forSolarWinds Platform Self-Hosted

Resource toolkit: Prepare to install or upgrade SolarWinds Platform products

Use the following resources to plan your installation or upgrade and to prepare your environment.

Plan your installation or upgrade

Use this checklist to verify product requirements before you get started. The SolarWinds Installer will alert you to warning or critical level requirement issues during the System Check.

  Installation and upgrade checklist

Review product release notes:

Review system requirements.

SolarWinds strongly recommends that you install the SolarWinds Platform on a server that is neither public, nor internet-facing. To learn about best practices for configuring your SolarWinds Platform installation securely, see Secure Configuration for the SolarWinds Platform.

Use the following links and the multi-module environments guidelines to make sure your environment has all of the required hardware and software.

Review licenses, gather keys, and review maintenance status.

Review your product licenses and maintenance status and determine if you need to make any changes. You can download license keys for your new SolarWinds Platform products through the Customer Portal. Discuss license upgrades with your SolarWinds account manager or contact SolarWinds.

Gather credentials.

Make sure you have all account credentials, SolarWinds Platform database credentials, your SolarWinds account, and local admin server credentials.

Considerations for upgrades

The following situations can affect your upgrade process.

Do you need to migrate?

If product requirements have changed, you might need to migrate products and databases to new dedicated servers before you can upgrade to the latest version. Determine whether you need to migrate by reviewing new product requirements, performance, and company needs.

Migrating adds time to your upgrade, but upgrades provide a good opportunity to update your environment. See the Migration Guide for more information.

Do you have products out of maintenance?

If you have a product that is out of maintenance (that is, the license has expired), and you attempt to upgrade to product versions that run on the Orion Platform 2020.2 or earlier, the installer upgrades the product to the latest version that became available before maintenance expired and is compatible with other installed products.

Be aware that having an out-of-maintenance product can prevent you from upgrading products that are currently under maintenance. This occurs when the out-of-maintenance product is not compatible with the latest version of the SolarWinds Platform.

Example: You have IPAM out of maintenance. You want to upgrade NPM. Upgrading NPM would also upgrade the platform to a version that is incompatible with your version of IPAM. The installer reports the issue and suggests resolutions, but it does not allow you to upgrade NPM until the issue is resolved.

Recommendations:

  • Renew. SolarWinds highly recommends renewing. Products under maintenance have access to technical support and all the latest upgrades.
  • Uninstall the product that restricts your upgrade.
  • Move the out-of-maintenance product to a different server. See the Migration Guide for details.

Prepare for an upgrade

  Upgrade checklist

Schedule the upgrade.

Set up the maintenance window, preferably during off-peak hours. Depending on the number of products, size of the databases, and size of the environment, you might need several hours to complete your installation.

If you upgrade or install new SolarWinds Platform products into an existing deployment, all SolarWinds services and polling must be offline for a length of time, causing you to lose a portion of polled data.

When you upgrade an Orion Platform 2019.2 or later in an online environment, you can save time during the upgrade by pre-staging the installation files.

Notify your company of the upgrade schedule and maintenance window.

Back up your database and snapshot your VMs.

Back up your SolarWinds Platform database. If you need help, check your vendor's site for instructions.

If your SolarWinds Platform server is on a virtual machine, create a snapshot or copy of your VM.

You cannot roll back an upgrade. Always back up your database.

If you have written custom code, back it up.

Prepare the servers

Depending on your licensed SolarWinds Platform products, you might need to prepare multiple servers and configure ports in your firewall before installation.

  Server preparation checklist

Prepare servers for your SolarWinds Platform products and deployment:

  • SolarWinds Platform server: See your product's system requirements.

  • SolarWinds Platform database server: See your product's system requirements.

  • Primary and secondary servers for SolarWinds high availability: Review the HA requirements and VIP address information and prepare matching servers.

  • Additional polling engine servers: See the SolarWinds Scalability Guidelines.

  • Additional web server: See the SolarWinds Scalability Guidelines.

  • Additional databases: During an installation or upgrade, the installer creates the following databases if they do not already exist:

    • The NTA Flow Storage database stores flow data.
    • The Log and Event database stores log data from Log Analyzer (LA) or Log Manager (LM).

    These databases can be on the same server as the SolarWinds Platform database, or they can be on different servers. For more information, see Databases used by SolarWinds modules.

    When you are installing and configuring the Log and Event database, note the following: 

    • SolarWinds recommends that you enable full-text search to ensure optimum event log search performance within LA. You can still initiate event log searches without enabling this capability, but the speed and quality of your search may be significantly reduced.

    • Users may experience performance degradation if synchronous-commit mode for SQL availability groups is used on the Log and Event database. For high-load environments, asynchronous-commit mode is strongly recommended.

    Integrated products, such as DPA and Patch Manager, require a separate, dedicated database.

Run all Microsoft Windows updates.

Before installation, check for and run any Windows updates on all servers. If a Windows update runs during the installation, your system might reboot. The installation cannot complete if your system is waiting to reboot.

Open required ports.

Open the ports required by your products and any additional features you have enabled. For example, SolarWinds high availability has additional port requirements beyond product needs. The SolarWinds Platform uses these ports to issue management commands and to send and receive data.

Gotchas for SolarWinds Platform products

Be aware of the following changes or considerations that frequently affect installations or upgrades. For information about product-specific issues that could affect upgrades, see your product's release notes.

  • Installing SolarWinds Platform products and Access Rights Manager (ARM) on the same server causes a conflict with the RabbitMQ service. To avoid this, ARM and SolarWinds Platform products must be installed on separate servers. Note that ARM is not a SolarWinds Platform product.

  • Carefully review the port requirements for your products. Incorrect ports can cause communication and polling issues. See the Port requirements for all SolarWinds products for details.

Next steps