Last updated: March 23, 2015
Thanks for your interest in the Orion Global Search Technical Preview! This preview will give you some insight into what we're building and testing, and let us gather some important feedback from you on how things are coming together in your environment.
The latest Tech Preview build is: 1.0.2.1394 - included in NPM GA
Background: What's New in Orion Global Search Tech Preview (Build included with NPM 11.5 Release)
If you tuned in to the beta release of global search, you'll see a lot more polish and function with our tech preview edition. With the tech preview of Global Search, you can:
- Perform full-text search of Orion objects (NPM/SAM), syslogs, and traps
- View and interact with results from a single interface
- Use auto-complete to help find search terms
What to test in Orion Global Search Tech Preview
We're interested in your feedback around the general experience and "feel" of using global search, but we're also specifically interested in any impact to performance of your Orion systems. Our goal is to make the global search addition impact systems as little as feasible, but we recognize in some big environments (and those heavy in syslog/traps) we may not yet have the full picture of how this will work. Enter you! We're especially interested in:
- Performance
- When you first install the global search tech preview and it indexes historical data, did you notice any performance impact? CPU, memory?
- In day to day maintenance of your Orion system, do you notice any additional perceived impact from global search? CPU, memory?
- If you go look on any "normal" time of day (not actively making a ton of changes or purposefully testing performance), is the impact to system resources/performance acceptable? What does it look like?
- Usability
- What do you think of the search "language" - were you able to find what you were looking for? Were the suggestions helpful?
- On the results visualizations, are the refinements helpful? Are there things you'd find useful here or expected to see that you're not seeing? (There are a lot of things we'll be adding here, but all feedback welcome.)
How to Install
This release is supported in production environments, however the nagging voice of reason should always remind you to deploy in non-production environments first to be safe.
- Find and launch OGSInstaller.msi located in the Orion installers folder: ( ...\ProgramData\Solarwinds\Installers\ )
- Follow and finish the OGS program data installer
- Follow and finish Configuration Wizard. You'll see a new Elasticsearch Service configured
After you install global search, your existing NPM/SAM objects, syslog messages, and SNMP traps will be indexed.
How to Uninstall/Remove
Two steps:
- In Programs and Features (Control Panel\Programs\Programs and Features) select SolarWinds Orion OGS v1.0.2 and uninstall
- Launch the Configuration Wizard manually and finish it
Caveats & Notes
- Global search supports both NPM 11.5 and SAM 6.2
- Indexed objects for NPM: Nodes, Interfaces, Volumes, Groups, Traps, Syslogs, Virtual Machines, Virtual Hosts, VMware Datacenters and Virtual Clusters
- Indexed objects for SAM: indexing of Applications, IIS, SQL, Components, Exchanges and AppInsights
- For indexing information (index progress for historical data or general status), check out the "Indexing Status" page under Settings
- Caveats/Known Issues:
- Autocomplete suggestions are missing from additional websites
- In rare cases in highly taxed environments, some elements may not be indexed (please report this issue if you encounter any indexing problems)
- In some cases, items may show as not indexed yet while they actually are on the indexing status page
- After removing syslog/traps, the indexing database may still show some space consumed (even though the space is not being used)
- Some MAC addresses may not appear in search results or may not display properly (MACs with colons may be missing, MACs with dashes or dots may not display properly)
- Properties with backslashes may not be searchable
- If the indexing service is not running, the status page may show an error
- Changing databases after OGS has been installed may cause indexing to freeze
- Stopping VMware polling does not remove results from index
- Titles of VIM entities aren't clickable on the results page, VIM entities don't have expected icons
- Services and processes may not have their "final" names and descriptions
- Values of Orion.Nodes.Status are difficult to search
- Some Windows 2008 environments may take a long time to restart the Elasticsearch service, making it look unresponsive
As we discover issues, I'll be sure to add them here.
Reporting Issues and Troubleshooting
If things don't seem to be going right with global search and you have any concerns about the integrity of your NPM installation, we recommend you uninstall.
Before uninstalling, we'd appreciate the opportunity to investigate the issue with you - either via provided diagnostics or live via online meeting. If that's possible, let us know, and we'll round up the right people. Your feedback will help us improve global search before we head too far further down the road of development.
The development and product management teams will be watching this space on Thwack for issues. Any issues reported to our tech support team will also be referred to our development team.
Info on running diagnostics: http://knowledgebase.solarwinds.com/kb/questions/3311/
Important Disclaimer: As we say with statements in our What We Are Working On posts, this technical preview is a demonstration of potential future capabilities and is not a commitment to delivering this feature in the next (or potentially any) release of NPM, SAM, or as a standalone product. We appreciate your feedback and will take it into account when making decisions on whether, when, and how to implement the demonstrated features. While we are committed to providing guidance for this technical preview in production environments, it is not considered officially released and supported as a part of NPM product maintenance, and our ultimate advice may simply be to remove the technical preview.