NCM 7.

4 Release Notes
Updated 06/09/2015

These release notes provide additional guidance for SolarWinds Orion Network Configuration Manager (NCM) 7.4

For NCM environment requirements, see NCM 7.4 system requirements.

Notes:

• An NCM Administrator can access and change all NCM settings without being an Orion Administrator.
• To manage discovered nodes with NCM automatically, setup at least one Connection Profile with "Use for auto
detect" selected.
• If you do not want a node that you delete from NCM to be added back during a discovery, open node properties
(NCM Settings > Add or Manage Nodes > Edit Properties) and select Never under Manage Node(s) in NCM.
• Do not delete nodes if you want to retain historical data about inventory, configuration, and so on. Instead,
unmanage that node.
• Users who integrate NCM with other products running on Orion Platform 2015.1 (such as NPM 11.5.2) cannot
create new alerts using the Advanced Alert Manager tool or modify Trigger/Reset conditions for existing alerts.

New Features and Improvements

SolarWinds NCM version 7.4 includes the following new features and improvements:
• Cisco IOS and ASA Vulnerability Reporting - NCM uses Cisco IOS and ASA firmware and configuration
vulnerability data from the National Vulnerability Database to record which nodes in NCM are vulnerable. This
information is available in a new Firmware Vulnerability resource and as a report.
• NCM Entirely Web-based

The NCM desktop application is no longer available and all functionality has migrated to the SolarWinds Orion Web
Console.
• New Compliance Reports
◦ You can run over 60 Defense Information Systems Agency Security Technical Implementation Guide (DISA
STIG) policy reports, preconfigured with the necessary rules and policies.

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means nor modified, decompiled, disassembled, published or distributed, in whole or in part, or translated to any electronic medium or other
means without the written consent of SolarWinds. All right, title, and interest in and to the software and documentation are and shall remain 1
the exclusive property of SolarWinds and its respective licensors.
 ◦ You can run National Institute of Standards and Technology Federal Information Security Management Act
(NIST FISMA) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) reports.
• Device Template Wizard
◦ Create and edit device templates using the new, web-based Device Template Wizard in the SolarWinds Orion
Web Console.
◦ All templates from previous versions of NCM are migrated to the SolarWinds Orion database during an
upgrade.
◦ Access templates that other SolarWinds users share through thwack directly in Device Template Management.
• Enhanced Change Approval Workflow

The NCM approval system allows three different workflows:

◦ Use a one-tier approval workflow to submit configuration changes to an NCM administrator.
◦ Use a non-privileged, two-tier approval workflow to require non-privileged users (any user with the
WebUploader role) to submit configuration changes to two different approval groups.
◦ Use an inclusive, two-tier approval workflow to require all users to submit configuration changes to two different
approval groups.
• New Template Options

The following options are now available:

◦ UseExactPromptMatch - This option allows NCM to detect command mode prompts when they appear as a
separate line.
◦ UseMultipleDownloadCommands - This option allows NCM to capture outputs from all commands in
the DownloadConfig command in the device template.
• Web-based Reports
◦ Create and edit reports using new, web-based reports.
◦ NCM now uses Orion Platform reports (HOME > Reports) instead of the NCM reporting pages (CONFIGS >
Reports).
◦ Previous reports are not migrated to the web-based reports system and can no longer be edited after an
upgrade.
◦ Schedule reports with the Orion Report Schedulers instead of the NCM Run Report job.
• Policy Violation Remediation

You can automatically remediate violations in a device configuration on multiple nodes using a script.
• Configuration Change Auditing

Syslog data forwarded from network devices as part of real-time change detection includes the name of the user
associated with the change.
• Web-based Alerts
◦ Create and manage alerts using the web-based alerting engine.
◦ Alerts created using the desktop-based alerting engine are automatically migrated to the web-based alerting
engine.
• Web Transfer Status Page

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means nor modified, decompiled, disassembled, published or distributed, in whole or in part, or translated to any electronic medium or other
means without the written consent of SolarWinds. All right, title, and interest in and to the software and documentation are and shall remain 2
the exclusive property of SolarWinds and its respective licensors.
 The Web Transfer Status page now displays all historical transfer operation requests and results.
• End-of-Life Device Management

You can choose to assign End-of-Life information to nodes based on part numbers automatically.
• Transfer Status Page

The Transfer Status page now displays all real-time notification requests.
• Improved Charts Look and Feel

NCM charts now look like other SolarWinds Orion charts and load more quickly.
• Improved Configuration Upload

Choose what character to use as a line break.

Fixed Issues
SolarWinds NCM 7.4 includes the following fixes:

Issue Case Number

572974
Cannot always upload configuration files to Juniper devices.

649758
Issues with exporting reports to Excel or CSV.

643708
Some Overall Security Compliance graphs do not update

668186
Incorrect values are calculated in the Report for Memory for Cisco devices.

Some devices with SNMP-defined Configuration Download do not responding to 705481

credentials.

492270
Configuration files are truncated when the body contains command mode prompt.

567365
Web Console performs slowly.

571822
NCM Jobs do not run.

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means nor modified, decompiled, disassembled, published or distributed, in whole or in part, or translated to any electronic medium or other
means without the written consent of SolarWinds. All right, title, and interest in and to the software and documentation are and shall remain 3
the exclusive property of SolarWinds and its respective licensors.
 Extra lines and spaces appear in the configuration when copied from Orion Web 475925
Console to Notepad.

Real-time Change Notification does not work when sent from different source 693159
interfaces.

672164
Overall Policy Violations resource does not display.

720622
Orion Services stop when downloading configuration files.

774419
NCM displays 10 Gbps interfaces as 4.3 Gbps.

732584
Inventory Reports show the wrong port speed.

778215
Filtered selection does not work for script deployment.

725333
The NCM installer only creates TFTP/SCP root folders in the default location.

408880
Comparison criteria do not handle the " or \' characters.

588483
Actions taken by administrators do not display in the User Tracking Report.

357407
Whitespace is not preserved in the Config Change Template.

355808
You can view hidden passwords in the Edit Node page if you view the HTML source.

An SQL query locks the node table when the configuration catalog contains files 735983
over the support size.

569200
Legends contain numerical values instead of status.

Copyright © 1999-2017 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may 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 written consent of SolarWinds. All right, title, and interest in and to the software and documentation are and shall remain 4
the exclusive property of SolarWinds and its respective licensors.
 616158
Report Generator does not save to a network drive.

728268, 678872, 697952,

MSXML vulnerabilities found in security scanners. 769264

Known Issues
This version of SolarWinds NCM includes the following known issues:

Case
Issue
Number

If you upgraded from an RC version of NCM 7.4, you may not have a full set of the new compliance
reports.
-
To resolve this issue, navigate to Manage Policy Reports, delete all reports, and run the SolarWinds
Configuration Wizard.

After uninstalling NCM, you may not be able to open the SolarWinds Orion Web Console and charts you
export to PDF may not display the correct time range or colors. -

To resolve this issue, open the folder on your SolarWinds Orion web server, and remove all NCM files.

During the upgrade, you may be notified that some services cannot be stopped automatically.
-
To resolve this issue, open the Orion Services Manager from the Start menu, and stop all services.

Since NCM 7.4 does not support the concept of Node Groups, Web-based reports look different in
comparison with NCM 7.3 and before. -

To restore the previous display, edit the relevant report, adding the property.

User cannot export large reports, such as vulnerability reports, that have more than 50,000 items.
-
To resolve this issue, open the report for editing, choose Edit Table in the Content section, and filter the
results to 50,000 or less.

Copyright © 1999-2017 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may 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 written consent of SolarWinds. All right, title, and interest in and to the software and documentation are and shall remain 5
the exclusive property of SolarWinds and its respective licensors.
 Cannot manage pollers in the SolarWinds Orion Web Console's Threshold and Polling Settings if you -
only have NCM installed.

Node discovery may not always add nodes to NCM after an upgrade.
674544
To resolve this issue, following NCM upgrade, add a new Connection Profile (select "Use for auto
detect"), and then re-run the node discovery.

Resources such as Node List, Search NCM, Inventory Details, Compare Configs, Download, and all
charts, stop working when dragged and dropped. -

To resolve this issue, refresh the page.

NCM is not able to connect to certain devices with SSH-only log-in, receiving this error from the server:
"Invalid username or password". 674544

See this Knowledge Base article for the workaround to this issue.

Orion Web Console shows a blank page after installing NPM 11.5.2 when NCM 7.4 is already installed.
-
To resolve this issue, re-run SolarWinds Configuration Wizard.

The following protocols, settings, and encryption algorithms were not tested:
• AES256 encryption for IPV6 nodes -
• SNMP config transfer for Catalyst MIB devices
• Config transfer using Blowfish and CAST128 encryption algorithms

NCM resources do not work correctly when they are on same view as IPAM's resources -

The Node List loads slowly with a large number (10K) of nodes in the database when the nodes are not -
grouped.

-
A script fails when loading a node list that contains a group with 30K or more nodes.

Copyright © 1999-2017 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may 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 written consent of SolarWinds. All right, title, and interest in and to the software and documentation are and shall remain 6
the exclusive property of SolarWinds and its respective licensors.
 Physical Entities (Serial Number) report loads slowly when there is a large number of records (a million
or more.
-
To resolve this issue, select the sort on a single column option (Settings > NCM Settings > Advanced
Settings).

Access to Orion Web Console blocked after NCM installation if the SQL account you have assigned to
your Orion Platform database has not been configured with appropriate permissions.
352722
To resolve this issue, you must create a new SQL account with required permissions as detailed in
this Knowledge Base article.

Config download aborts when the config line (for example, the hostname on a line by itself in the banner
text) exactly matches the length of the device's prompt.
-
To resolve this issue, ensure that you surround any banner text with comment operators. For example,
if your hostname appears in the banner text as LGC6509E, you would change it to "*LGC6509E*

The importance of policy updates (Cisco Energywise) is hard coded to 100. This is caused by a -
limitation imposed by the EnergyWise MIB data collection mechanism.

The time returned by device (EnergyWise) is based on the device time. Recurrence policies (based on -
chron jobs) respect the time set on the device, not the time of SolarWinds NPM or SolarWinds NCM.

Do not use a 7 to represent Sunday in the day of the week option of your recurrence policy. At this time,
-
7 is not recognized by SolarWinds NPM and will cause problems with your EnergyWise Policy Overview
Calendar.

SolarWinds End of Life Policy

In order to continue to drive innovation and new functionality into our products, SolarWinds must transition customers
from legacy versions of software to our current versions. Please review the below support schedule:
• 6/04/2015: End-of-Life (EoL) announcement – Customers on SolarWinds NCM v7.1.1 or older should begin
transitioning to SolarWinds NCM 7.4.
• 8/31/2015 End-of-Engineering (EoE) – Service release, bug fixes, workarounds, and service packs for SolarWinds
NCM v7.1.1 or older will no longer actively be supported by SolarWinds.

Copyright © 1999-2017 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may 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 written consent of SolarWinds. All right, title, and interest in and to the software and documentation are and shall remain 7
the exclusive property of SolarWinds and its respective licensors.
 • 8/31/2016 End-of-Life (EoL) – SolarWinds will no longer provide technical support for SolarWinds NCM v7.1.1 or
older.

View the SolarWinds EOL Policy online.

Version history
NCM 7.3.2

NCM 7.3.1

NCM 7.3

NCM 7.2.2

NCM 7.2.1

NCM 7.2

Legal
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No part of this document may 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 written consent of
SolarWinds. All right, title, and interest in and to the software and documentation are and shall remain the exclusive
property of SolarWinds and its respective licensors.

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means nor modified, decompiled, disassembled, published or distributed, in whole or in part, or translated to any electronic medium or other
means without the written consent of SolarWinds. All right, title, and interest in and to the software and documentation are and shall remain 8
the exclusive property of SolarWinds and its respective licensors.