2008-07-01

WebTrends 8.5 Upgrade Success

Following the issues in my previous post, the upgrade completed successfully.

The only minor complaint were the status screens. While there has been a major improvement in terms of providing accurate time estimates, one has to remember that these are estimates and not to put too much faith in them. At least this time round, WebTrends provides a screen per module so can monitor the progress.

One one of the first screens the count got down to 5 minutes remaining and after about 3 minutes it jumped back up to 6 minutes which was about right. On the last of these screens it sat at 14 seconds for what seemed like a eternity. Fortunately it was about 6.5 minutes.

The whole upgrade on my test server (4 profiles) took approximately 45 minutes once I shut down the WebTrends Scheduler (see previous post).

I did run into one minor problem after the install. When I tried to run a profile update the update failed. I also tried to run a new profile and it also failed. After some investigation, it turned out that despite entering a new license key during the install (as early posted), WebTrends didn't retain the new 8.5 key, but instead retained the original 8.1 key. A quick delete of the old key and I activated the new key and all is good. WebTrends is now up and running and generating report data. (this issue has been reported to the WebTrends technical support team)

I'll now be putting WebTrends through its paces and should be able to report back on the quality and stability of the new GeoTrends module in a day or so.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

A quick question: After installing 8.5, is there any way to transfer profiles from an older version (with MySQL database) to 8.5 which comes with MS SQL?

Unknown said...

The answer to your question is yes. If you're doing the upgrade on the same server WebTrends does it automatically.

If you want to install the upgrade on a new server, you need to first install 8.1 on that server, transfer the appropriate files (in the documented way) and then do the upgrade.

If you need more specific needs, contact me through my companies web site www.knechtology.com and I'll see what we can do.

Unknown said...

Sorry, but my question was something else. I have the 8.5 installed, and I have a bunch of profiles under a 8.0 which I'd like to copy to 8.5.

Unknown said...

Sorry I don't think that can be done.

The only way I could see it possibly being accomplished is to back-up your 8.0 installation upgrade your 8.0 installation to 8.5.

Once there you may be able to port the profiles to the other instance of WebTrends by some manipulation of the various reference file and the SQL Express database. Give WT tech support a call first.

If successful, you could then restore your 8.0 installation and have both running.

I know WebTrends has been working on a way to port profiles from one server to another (within the same version). I was hoping this was going to be in the 8.5 version, but I haven't found anything in the documentation. So perhaps in the next upgrade.