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Updating

Observium has been designed from its initial inception to be easy and seamless to upgrade. We recommend keeping Community Edition installations updated to the latest version and updating Subscription Edition installations at least once per month.

Quick Update

To jump immediately to the Subscription Edition update instructions, click here

Subscription Edition

What is the Subscription Edition?

The Subscription Edition is released in stable and current trains using our SVN-based update system. It includes the new alerting system with advanced features, the traffic accounting system, routing protocols and additional future Service Provider and Enterprise-targeted features. It receives receive rapid bug fixes and feature improvements thanks to the SVN-based updates system.

You can subscribe using our Subscription signup page.

What is SVN?

Subversion (SVN) is a version control system that allows users to download the very latest version of Observium without having to wait for someone to get around to packaging it. Advantages to using Subversion include the latest version, vastly simplified updating, the ability to roll back an upgrade and the ability to easily create and submit patches.

Below are some quick directions for a couple of common tasks.

Why use SVN?

We use SVN as an automatic update mechanism in order to rapidly deliver improvements and fixes to users without the hassle of traditional packaged updates.

Rolling and Stable

Our use of SVN allows us to maintain two parallel trains of Observium, rolling and stable. rolling receives daily updates, and stable receives weekly updates. The stable train is intended to be safe to use for automatically updating installations.

Switch between Rolling and Stable trains

Sometime required to switch from stable to rolling train, for exaple to check fixed issue or updated/added feature. For switch use this commands from main observium dirrectory:

Stable -> Rolling

 svn up
 svn switch https://svn.observium.org/svn/observium/trunk

Rolling -> Stable

 svn switch https://svn.observium.org/svn/observium/branches/stable

Upgrading the Subscription Edition to the very latest version

Upgrading between releases with SVN is simple. If you have direct access to the command-line on the server, you can enter the commands below directly; alternatively, you can maintain a copy on a local machine and upload updated versions to the server.

To upgrade Observium, simply use the command below in the root of the installation directory.

svn update

To ensure that your database is kept up to date, you must run discovery.php immediately after an SVN update.

./discovery.php -u

Upgrading the Subscription Edition to a specific version

You can upgrade to a specific revision with the following command:

svn update -r <revision number>

Let's say you want to install/upgrade version 0.12.4.3049. The SVN revision is the last number, so run the following:

svn update -r 3049

It may be possible something is broken in an official release and was fixed in the development version. We can not oversee all code changes and impact they may have to any of your devices, so we can not accept bug reports for non-very-latest versions. If you find a bug, try the latest version and if it's still broken, contact us. If it's not broken any longer, well, excellent!

Airgapped / No-internet Upgrade

If you need to upgrade an Observium installation on a system without internet connectivity, you'll need to perform an SVN checkout on an internet-connected system and transfer the files over to the Observium system.

On a system with internet connectivity, check out the current stable version of Observium and generate a .tar.gz from it. Make sure there is not an existing Observium directory:

rm -rf observium
svn co https://svn.observium.org/svn/observium/branches/stable observium
tar zcvf observium.tar.gz observium

Transfer this file over to the Observium system and place it in /opt, then replace the existing Observium installation with the contents and migrate over the old settings and data.

If you have network connectivity to the intermediate system from the Observium system we'd recommend scp, otherwise you can transfer the .tar.gz via a USB drive. 

cd /opt
mv observium observium_old
tar zxvf observium-community-latest.tar.gz
mv /opt/observium_old/rrd observium/
mv /opt/observium_old/logs observium/
mv /opt/observium_old/config.php observium/

Update DB schema:

/opt/observium/discovery.php -u

You should see the new Observium version string in the discovery script output and in the web interface.

If it has been a very long time since you've updated (12 months or more), you may want to force an immediate rediscovery of all devices to make sure things are up to date :

/opt/observium/discovery.php -h all

If the upgrade is successful you can delete the old observium version:

rm -rf /opt/observium_old

Community Edition

Upgrade to latest Major release

Disable observium cronjobs optional

Run the following commands (as root):

cd /opt
mv observium observium_old
wget -Oobservium-community-latest.tar.gz https://www.observium.org/observium-community-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf observium-community-latest.tar.gz
mv /opt/observium_old/rrd observium/
mv /opt/observium_old/logs observium/
mv /opt/observium_old/config.php observium/

Update DB schema:

/opt/observium/discovery.php -u

If it has been a very long time since you've updated (12 months or more), you may want to force an immediate rediscovery of all devices to make sure things are up to date : 

/opt/observium/discovery.php -h all

Re-enable observium cronjobs optional

You may now delete your observium_old directory if everything has updated correctly:

rm -rf observium_old