Skip to main content

NightWatchman Enterprise 7.3

Upgrading NightWatchman Enterprise

Planning

To ensure a successful upgrade to NightWatchman Management Center 7.3, we recommend you undertake a planning exercise to understand issues that may arise and agree a suitable approach for the business.

Scope

The following 1E product versions are in scope for this upgrade process.

Product

Installer Type

NightWatchman Management Center v7.2 (or later)

Server

WakeUp Server v7.2 (or later)

Server

We recommend that you upgrade your NightWatchman version to the latest version before it goes out of support. The installer supports direct upgrades from NightWatchman 7.2 and 7.2.500. You can find the latest 1E releases on the 1E Support Portal, .

There are two options that cover the cases where upgrades from earlier systems are required:

  • Direct upgrade – with a direct upgrade, you do not need to step through the intervening releases and instead do a direct upgrade to NightWatchman version 7.3

  • Phased upgrade:

    Version

    Phased upgrade process

    7.2

    The process for a phased upgrade from NightWatchman 7.2 is:

    1. Upgrade to NightWatchman version 7.2.500

    2. Upgrade NightWatchman version 7.2.500 to version 7.3

Best practices

In all cases, we advise the following:

  • Test your upgrade path and processes in a lab prior to upgrading your production environment, especially if you are upgrading to version 7.3 from and old version such as 7.0 or 7.1.

  • Upgrade all NightWatchman Management Center and WakeUp servers before starting the upgrade of any NightWatchman Agents and 1E Clients with the WakeUp module enabled.

  • If you are unsure about the upgrade, engage one of our consultants. Contact your 1E account team for more details

  • Check our documentation and knowledge base articles for relevant updates at https://1eportal.force.com/

If running earlier versions of the above software, we recommend that a new installation of NightWatchman Management Center 7.3 is implemented instead of performing an upgrade. Detailed information can be found in installing NightWatchman Management Center and installing the WakeUp Server.

Note

Ensure that you are using a supported version of SQL Server for NightWatchman 7.3

Custom reports

If custom reports have been developed for a specific version of the product to extend the standard reporting capabilities, consideration should be given to these as an on-going business requirement. While every effort is made to minimize the changes in the back-end reporting architecture, schema changes in later versions might cause custom reports to run with errors following the upgrade.

The upgrade process provides guidance to back-up and restore custom reports; however, we recommended that the upgrade process is tested prior to implementing on production environments in order to identify any issues. Contact your 1E account team if issues are encountered with custom reports following an upgrade and there is an on-going business requirement for these. As custom reports are not covered by the standard 1E support agreement, any remedial work to allow compatibility with 7.3 might be chargeable.

Approach

The overall approach is to upgrade server components first followed by clients:

  1. Upgrade to NightWatchman Management Center 7.3

  2. Upgrade to WakeUp Server 7.3

  3. Upgrade to Web WakeUp 7.3

  4. Upgrade to NightWatchman Agent 7.3

  5. Upgrade to the latest 1E Client with the WakeUp module enabled

The approach assumes that the server components are upgraded in a like-for-like configuration. If you plan to relocate your server components to different hosts as part of your planned upgrade, we recommend you contact your 1E account team to arrange a discussion with a specialist for advice.

Licensing

License keys are required for the NightWatchman Enterprise 7.3 components. These are provided to all customers with active maintenance agreements. WakeUp requires a license key when installing server components and NightWatchman requires a license key as part of the 1E NightWatchman Agent install. If you have a version 7.x license, it will work with 7.3. Version 6 licenses will not work.

Rollback

The upgrade can be reverted as long as client agents have not been upgraded to 7.3. Rollback requires a valid backup of the AgilityFrameworkReporting database and its associated program files directories (including import scripts and custom reports).

To carry out a rollback:

  1. Uninstall all 7.3 server components – NightWatchman Management Center/Agility Framework/WakeUp.

  2. Delete the AgilityFrameworkReporting database using SQL Management Studio.

  3. Restore your pre-upgrade version of the AgilityFrameworkReporting database from backup.

  4. Install previous version of NightWatchman Management Center (or Agility Framework with NightWatchman and WakeUp product packs) and do not drop database.

  5. Copy any import script and/or custom report files to the previous location.

  6. Install previous versions of WakeUp servers where you upgraded them.

  7. Validate functionality using suggested tests within this document.

Changes in functionality

Certain new features in NightWatchman Enterprise 7.0 and above rely on ActiveEfficiency Server integration. If you are intending to use the following features it is recommended that ActiveEfficiency v1.7 or later is installed prior to upgrading NightWatchman Enterprise:

  • WakeUp integration with Nomad

NightWatchman Enterprise 7.1 and later include the new Power Optimization and Reboot Optimization features, both of which are enabled by default when clients are installed or upgraded – they can be disabled with installation parameters or by toggling client registry values.

The Power Optimization and Reboot Optimization features can also be enabled or disabled by using NightWatchman console policies. New policies have power optimization automatically enabled by default. Existing policies will not exhibit this behavior and so are disabled by default. Enable Power Optimization ore Reboot Optimization when you change policies if you want this feature to continue to be enabled on clients.

NightWatchman Enterprise 7.2 and later includes Improved reporting console, Online / offline status ‘stoplights’ in the NightWatchman console and few Enhancements to NightWatchman policy management. Hardware Utilization is renamed to Computer Reclaim with addition to rarely used computers reports.

NightWatchman Enterprise 7.2.500 and later includes changes in 1E Agent. 1E Agent is renamed to 1E NightWatchman Agent and WakeUp Agent is moved as a module in the 1E Client.The WakeUp ConfigMgr console collection and computer menu extensions now have two more options whenever you run the WakeUp Server installer on a computer that has a ConfigMgr console.Options are - Send WakeUp with Software Update Deployment Evaluation& Send WakeUp with Application Deployment Evaluation. Also the log files for Wakeup Server and the NightWatchman and WakeUp Agents can now rollover multiple times.

Technical preparation

In order to create a recovery point, take a backup of the database which can be achieved by one of the following methods:

Method 1

If the server is dedicated to NightWatchman Management Center the IIS services can be stopped by running the following command from a command prompt.

iisreset /stop
Method 2

If the server shares IIS configuration with other applications which prevents the IIS services from being stopped, the NightWatchman Management Center application pools can be taken offline. To do this, start IIS Manager, expand the server, select Application Pools and stop:

  • NWMC_AFWebservice

  • NWMC_ReportConsole

Note

If the application pools are stopped (instead of stopping IIS), these will be restarted automatically by the installer following successful upgrade to NightWatchman Management Center 7.2. In this scenario, the application pools should be manually stopped again following the upgrade to prevent processing of client data until validation has completed.

Prior to running the SQL backup, the AFwebservice web service should be taken offline, to prevent clients from reporting data into the server during the upgrade. This is particularly important in a roll-back situation to prevent data loss from occurring.

Common Backup Tasks

Connect to the server hosting the NightWatchman Management Center database and using SQL Server Management Studio, take a full backup of the AgilityFrameworkReporting database.

Using a backup tool, backup the existing 1E software installation folder and all subfolders and files on all servers where NightWatchman Management Center and WakeUp Server have been installed.

If any custom reports have been developed for the existing version of the software (either by 1E or another party), copy the report files (with file extensions .rdlc and .rdlx to a temporary location. By default, these are located in C:\Program Files (x86)\1E\NightWatchman Management Center\ReportConsole\Source (or C:\Program Files (x86)\1E\AgilityFramework\AFConsole for previous versions).

If any stored procedures have been developed for the custom reports, these should be saved as .sql files and copied to the same temporary location. The stored procedures are referenced in the .rdlx files and can be saved as .sql files using SQL Server Management Studio. If a previous version of NightWatchman Management Center is installed, copy any modified or customized import scripts and input files to a temporary location.

Note

Import scripts are used to create the organization and location structures within the NightWatchman Console and automatically assign computers to the appropriate level in the structure based on subnets, Active Directory Sites or Active Directory Organizational Units

By default these are located on the NightWatchman server in C:\Program Files (x86)\1E\NightWatchman Management Center\ConsoleService\ImportScripts and have the file extensions .vbs and .csv

If any customization has taken place with the NightWatchman agent scripts, this configuration should be backed up in order that it can be re-applied after upgrade. Examples are:

  • Custom or modified NightWatchman shutdown scripts (default installation path on the agents is C:\Program Files\1E\NightWatchman\Scripts).

  • Custom scripts to control NightWatchman processing e.g. prerun.vbs, runalways.vbs

Note

The default installation directory for the scripts in 7.3 is C:\Program Files (x86)\1E\NightWatchman\Scripts

In this section: