Winter 2020 Update

Release Date: February 2020

Dashboards, Reports and UI

Improved look and task flows for setup pages

Login, account, user management and setup pages now have an improved look and feel with simplified task flows.

These enhancements reduce the number of steps and clicks necessary to navigate the platform efficiently, while also providing enhanced visualization.

Improved widget selection for dashboards

Selecting new widgets is now easier with a new palette of commonly-used widgets. This visualization makes selecting widgets easier and more transparent.

New alert statistics widget

The alert statistics widget shows alert’s volume reduction by each stage in OpsRamp’s alert processing pipeline. This widget provides a real-time view of how the machine learning models reduce alert noise.

Graphs in custom metric reports

Custom metric reports now support an option to include time series graphs for deeper analysis of insights tracked by OpsRamp.

Ticket activity log in ticket export

Exports of ticket data now include the activity log for each ticket. This allows for external data warehouses that consume data exports to accurately account for time spent in each ticket state. See Dashboards and Reportsfor more information.

Event Management

Recommend mode

First Response and Alert Escalation policies now provide a new mode - the Recommend mode. In Recommend mode, you will see actions that OpsRamp recommends for an alert - based on its automated learning. You can then apply the recommended actions with a single click.

This feature helps you advance from Observed mode, which provides passive insight into decisions that OpsRamp would have made. With recommend mode, you can have a user perform final validation before acting on learning-driven recommendations.

Visualize seasonality patterns in alerts

You can now visualize patterns for alerts that are candidates for auto-suppression. You will see a link within alerts that are auto-suppressed or recommended for auto-suppression to launch a widget showing the historical and estimated trends for alert recurrence.

Link knowledge articles to incidents automatically

Knowledge articles play a vital role in helping the IT staff to resolve incidents. Now, you can configure KB articles as part of the alert escalation policy. The incident ticket created through the policy will have knowledge articles linked. Alert escalation policies can also learn or be trained to automatically link relevant knowledge articles to incidents.

Simplified alert correlation policies

Alert correlation policies are now easier to configure with a newly designed page, which presents policy options in an intuitive layout.

Change detection for all metrics

Prior to this release, change-based thresholds were available only for metrics collected by the OpsRamp Agent and Gateway. Now, these thresholds are available for all metrics, including those collected by public cloud infrastructure and web services.

Improved filtering of Windows event logs

The monitoring template for Windows event logs now supports filtering on Message String, along with Source and Event ID.

Improved filtering of SNMP Traps

You can now include specific inclusion filters in the SNMP Trap monitors, making it easy to monitor SNMP traps of interest.

Interactive messages in Slack

With this release, the existing Slack integration is enhanced to support bi-directional integration. Once configured, users can view all OpsRamp-generated incidents as Slack messages on the configured channel and any updates on Slack messages will be reflected in the OpsRamp incident. See Slack for more information.

Usability improvements in email integration

The email-based integration framework has an improved user experience. The interface for defining parsing conditions has been simplified and the integration framework allows users to define a default parsing condition to avoid dropped email notifications.

Multiple property and parsing support for webhook-based integrations

Webhook-based event integrations now support improved parsing of event payloads and mapping event properties to OpsRamp’s event model.
Supported patterns:

• Between
• Before
• After
• Regular Expressions

New alert integrations

OpsRamp now includes integrations to ingest events, via webhooks, from the following products:

• Dynatrace
• Logz.io
• Prometheus
• Splunk
• Zabbix

Hybrid Cloud Discovery and Monitoring

Improved Windows and Linux discovery

OpsRamp now enables remote discovery of Windows and Linux servers using WMI and SSH protocols. See Discovery for more information.

WMI discovery is supported only through Windows-based gateway, while SSH discovery is available from both Windows & Linux gateways.

Custom monitors for Windows servers

With this release, the Gateway is available as a Windows application (see release note). Custom monitors, based on Powershell and WMI, are supported on the Windows gateway. You can now write agentless custom monitors for applications running on Windows systems.

See Agentless Monitors for more information.

Default availability monitors for cloud resources

The “Status/State” metric found in cloud monitoring templates will now be the default availability metric. This provides administrators with a high level understanding of resource availability immediately after assigning monitoring templates.

Topology discovery and visualization for Azure and Google Cloud Platform

Building on the existing support for AWS Topology, OpsRamp now supports automatic topology mapping for services in Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This enhanced topology enables teams to identify misconfigured routing rules, visualize VMs that have redundant network routes and more. This relationship data will also be leveraged by OpsRamp’s event correlation models in order to reduce alert fatigue and provide the cloud administrator more context when troubleshooting. See Service and Topology Maps for more information.

Expanded support for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud services

OpsRamp can now discover and monitor the following services:

AWS

• AWS Transit Gateway
• AWS CloudSearch
• AWS DocumentDB

Azure

• Azure Application Insights
• Azure Traffic Manager Profiles
• Azure Virtual Networks
• Azure Route Table
• Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set
• Azure SQL Elastic Pool
• Azure Service Bus

Google Cloud

• Google BigTable (Instances, Clusters, Nodes, Tables)
• Google Cloud Composer
• Google Cloud Filestore
• Google Cloud Firebase
• Google Cloud Firestore
• Google Cloud Memory Store for Redis
• Google Cloud Run
• Google Cloud TPU
• Google Cloud Tasks

For a complete list of supported AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud resources, see Support Matrix.

Onboard AWS resources with External ID and Role ARN

OpsRamp now allows users to onboard their AWS accounts using an External ID and Role ARN. This creates a more secure and stable mechanism for onboarding AWS resources and is aligned with AWS best practices. See Amazon AWS Integration for more information.

Topology map layout improvements

Users can visualize their discovered topology with a hierarchical view. With hierarchical views you can easily see dependency relationships, host connectivity to network infrastructure, and clustered resources.

Create Service Map from Topology Map

Now, you can create service maps from discovered topology results. Bridging service maps and topology gives context when creating service maps and will ultimately deliver better alignment with application or infrastructure topology. See Service and Topology Maps for more information.

Step-wise breakdown of Synthetic transaction performance

After creating a custom HTTPs synthetic using the Selenium plugin, OpsRamp will now be able to provide deep analysis into each step performed in the transaction. Having deeper insights into the Synthetic transaction enables web service owners to have more context when diagnosing and trying to pinpoint web service issues before the end users are impacted.

Improved template assignment for Synthetics

Users will now be able to assign templates to web services using device management policies. Many of the configuration parameters for synthetic monitors have also been moved to templates to allow for easier deployment and configuration of synthetic resources at scale. See Monitoring for more information.

Case sensitive custom attributes

Custom attributes are now case sensitive. Any attributes that are ingested from Third-party tools, or created natively in OpsRamp now retain their case. This means that users can take advantage of any custom tags that are created in Third-party tools, or natively, to group resources, and created service maps.

Uniform name attribute for all resource types

Users can now leverage the name attribute to create resource groups, assign monitoring templates or create service maps. The name attribute is derived from the following attributes with the corresponding priority:

• Alias Name
• Host Name
• Resource Name

Customers will now be able to use a consistent name attribute to query and use across the entire platform.

Define device group based on resource interfaces

Users may now use the interface names to group resources. This enables users to group resources that may share a common port or create service maps with the interfaces that support a service.

Azure Blob Store integration for data export

OpsRamp now supports Azure Blob storage. Users can take advantage of this integration, via the data export feature, to export data to Azure blob storage.

Instrumentation management

Ansible playbook to manage Linux Agent

Agent deployment on Linux machines can now be performed using Ansible playbooks. This feature helps users deploy and manage agents at scale with greater efficiency. Users can install agents, switch the agent from proxy to direct and vice versa, update agents, and uninstall agents. Users can download the Ansible playbook from the Agent download section. See Agents for more information.

Automated Linux Agent deployment for AWS Lightsail

OpsRamp can now automatically deploy the Linux Agent onto auto-provisioned AWS Lightsail virtual machines. With this capability, OpsRamp provides visibility into VMs as soon as they appear.

Changes in Linux and Windows Agent version numbering

The numbering scheme for OpsRamp Agent versions has been changed to align with product release numbers. See Agents for more information.

Windows Agent Release Version Number:

Linux Agent Release Version Number:

Agent installation and uninstallation logs

Windows and Linux Agents will now leave the trace of installation and uninstallation logs in the end machine. In the event of installation and uninstallation issues, these logs will give visibility about the Agent and help identify the root cause of the issue.

One-click to enable debug logs on agents

Agent logs can be set to debug mode from the OpsRamp UI. This makes it easy to temporarily enable debug mode to troubleshoot issues. See Agents for more information.

View agent logs from the UI

You can now see Agent logs from the UI using remote commands.

Release Notifications

A new notification feature is now available in the UI. OpsRamp will communicate product related notifications such as upcoming releases, Gateway updates, and other information through this new channel.

Windows Gateway (Beta)

The OpsRamp Gateway is now available as a Windows application. See Gateways for more information.

Manage proxy settings on gateways

As part of the Gateway security measures, the proxy service on the Gateway can be turned off. Users can perform this either from Gateway web UI,console UI, or API.

Password change option for ruser account on gateways

You can now change the password of the ruser account on the Gateway.

Gateway with persistent static IP configuration

By default, the Gateway appliance uses the IP address assigned by DHCP during the installation. Prior to this release, the Gateway did not persist the static IP address assigned in a non-DHCP network, between reboots. Now, the static IP address is persisted across reboots, on DHCP and non-DHCP networks.

Resource alias IP detection

The OpsRamp Agent is now able to identify all primary and corresponding alias IP addresses on a resource and makes them available in the resource attributes section under “Network Information”. With this, users have visibility into all IPs that are assigned on one or more network interfaces present on a resource.

Access Controls

Restrict access from specific IPs

OpsRamp now provides flexibility for administrators to control access to the OpsRamp UI, based on a user’s IP address. Partner-level administrators can specify a list of IPs from where users can login to OpsRamp.

Disabling multi-factor authentication requires one-time password

Users will need to re-authenticate themselves with OpsRamp using the one-time password before they can deactivate multi-factor authentication on user accounts. This provides another layer of security to ensure that organizations that require 2FA can stay in compliance.

APIs

OpsRamp platform provides a rich set of REST API’s across different platform components, enabling seamless integration with third party products. This release introduces brand new APIs for topology and monitoring management, along with enhancements to existing APIs.

Topology API

Now, you can extract Topology information from OpsRamp using REST APIs. Leverage this information to populate CMDB tools, perform impact analysis, and more. See Resources for more information.

Minimal details of Resource

A new Resource API endpoint to fetch minimal details of resources like synthetics or RDS resources is now available. This API was designed to return only key attributes of resources so that users could more quickly and efficiently access the resources they were looking for without receiving the full attribute payload. See Resouces for more information.

Improved Patch API

Patching information on a resource now provides status about the installed patch, delivering context for any patching failure or issue that may arise during the patch. See Patching for more information.

Improved resource API

Device Management Policy APIs have been updated with details about the mandatory payload attributes and additional attributes in the payload and responses. These checks ensure that administrators understand what payload attributes are necessary to successfully create a device management policy via the API. See Resources for more information.

Improved client API

Client APIs has been updated to restrict access of the platform by whitelisting IPs. See Tenancy and Access Controls for more information.

Deprecated features no longer available

As announced earlier in Planned Changes, the features below are no longer available in OpsRamp.

Classic Infrastructure UI

See Deprecation Notices for more information.

SSLv3 and RSA_with_RC4 Ciphers from NetApp Filer

See Deprecation Notices for more information.

SNMP Trap Filters

SNMP Trap Filters are replaced with the new SNMP Trap Configuration module available under Monitoring Management in the Setup section. See Deprecation Notices for more information.

Removal of Download to PDF option for knowledge articles

Download PDF menu option has now been removed from the knowledge base articles UI. See Deprecation Notices for more information.

Bulk Import option

As announced in a previous release, the Bulk Import feature is no longer available. You can use the resource APIs to add, change and remove resources in bulk.

Alert integrations

The following integrations are removed from the available list and alternatives are recommended.

User accounts without GDPR consent are disabled

As announced in a previous release, accounts of users who have not consented to OpsRamp’s implementation of GDPR policies have been disabled. Please contact OpsRamp Support to reactivate your account.

Order of Execution in Device Management policies

As announced in a previous release, the order of execution currently in device management policies will be removed. This change will have no impact on existing behavior or performance of device management policies.

Service Map UI Changes

In accordance with the deprecation of the classic infrastructure UI, there will be several changes to the creation of service maps.