An update for Deployment Manager is available. Click here...

mwoffendenmwoffenden Posts: 98
edited August 29, 2013 9:05AM in Deployment Manager
Love the weekly updates. However would the team consider providing a link in the following message that would allow the reader to check out the release notes before upgrading?

For example:

An update for Deployment Manager is available. Click here to upgrade, or click here to see the release notes.

Serves two purposes:

1) Allows the user to know what they are getting into by upgrading, and
2) Eliminates the inevitable hunting around trying to find the release notes.
Michael Woffenden
Founder and President
Information Results Corporation

Comments

  • There's usually a link before you upgrade, along the lines of "What's in this release" (see below), however we agree that it's not particularly obvious.

    14domk1.png

    We'll look at UI improvements to make the upgrade & associated details more obvious.

    Thanks for the feedback!
    Systems Software Engineer

    Redgate Software

  • There's usually a link before you upgrade, along the lines of "What's in this release"...
    Indeed there is, but I'm proposing that the initial screen is a better place for "What's in this release" link.

    Thanks for giving this consideration.
    Michael Woffenden
    Founder and President
    Information Results Corporation
  • Once you upgrade to the next release (2.2.6.10), future update messages will include a "what's new" link in the header message that will link to the release notes.

    Hope that helps,
    Mike
    Development Lead
    Redgate Software
  • Will we see it on the initial "upgrade" screen, or on the second screen?
    Michael Woffenden
    Founder and President
    Information Results Corporation
  • Sorry, I wasn't clear. When I said the "header message", I meant the green bar that you see at the top of every page telling you that there's an upgrade available. In other words, what you wanted ;-)
    Development Lead
    Redgate Software
  • Mike Upton wrote:
    ...the green bar that you see at the top of every page telling you that there's an upgrade available
    Ok, look forward to seeing that.

    The other area that is still not smooth is the agent update. Since the agent update needs to happen at the same time as the client update, is your team looking into making this more automatic? For that matter, why wouldn't you update the agents (if needed for that update) and the client at the same time, saving the user from taking this manual step?
    Michael Woffenden
    Founder and President
    Information Results Corporation
  • The agent upgrade doesn't actually need to happen at the same time. The worst that will happen with an old agent is that new deployment features (for example, masking variable values) will not be available against old agents.

    We have avoided automatically upgrading agents because they could well be running on production machines. We have generally considered that it is important not to make any changes to potential production machines without requiring some form of explicit user action. For example, there is a very small, but non-zero, risk that an agent upgrade will result in the target machine requiring a restart before it can be deployed to again.

    We could consider providing a configuration option to allow automatic agent upgrades, but obviously we have to balance that against all of the other features we'd like to implement.

    One feature we have added recently is that in the list of machines that will be affected by the deployment, we flag out-of-date machines, and provide a link to the upgrade operation:
    needs_upgrade.jpg
    Development Lead
    Redgate Software
  • Indeed I understand your concern about not upgrading agents on production machines without explicit user action, and I completely agree.

    At the same time, it's also good not to not leave anything in limbo, i.e, client at version X+1 and agents at version X. At least offer the user the chance to get everything updated at one time. Furthermore, agents of a different version could cause a deployment to fail, and there is no need to invite this needlessly.

    It's also not the best for a user to get to the deployment stage, only to be interrupted by the message (shown in your image) that the deployment may fail and their agents are out of date. It's the right message but not at the right point in the process. Seems like it's much better to at least offer the user to get everything updated all at once.

    Tell me what you think of this idea.

    1) Do the upgrade as you normally do.

    2) After the upgrade finishes (and if successful) display a question, something like:

    Your agents also need to be updated. Do you want to do this now?

    And two buttons: "Yes, upgrade agents now" or "Not now"

    This would be much cleaner process-wise. Thanks for considering this ... and maybe some other DM users can chime in on the topic as well.

    [Editorial note: These are all relatively small changes but put together they are making important improvements to DM. In my case, after a bit of a rough start with DM, my team is moving toward making DM a central part of our deployment strategy, largely due to ongoing improvements and stability, and your team's consistent attention to user's concerns. Keep up the good work!]
    Michael Woffenden
    Founder and President
    Information Results Corporation
Sign In or Register to comment.