GroundWork Monitor 7.1.1 Enterprise Release Notes

This document contains important information about the GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 7.1.1 Release. While this information is not required to install or upgrade, it may be useful to know when examining the new features of GroundWork Monitor that have been added, and there is also useful information about resolved issues in some detail included in a table at the end. Note that in contrast to prior release notes, we aren't including any information about changes from prior releases. This document only discusses changes since 7.1.0.

How to install or upgrade The install instructions for this release can be found here in the Knowledge Base.

This release of GroundWork Monitor fixes many existing issues, and adds several new features, mostly around usability and completeness of existing features. It is not a major upgrade in that we have not replaced or substituted any major components, but we have upgraded and updated, and added functionality to existing features.

SECTION 1 - Summary of new features and improvements in GroundWork Monitor 7.1.1

This is the paragraph to read if you don't plan on reading the rest of this document (TL:DR). We have updated the Cloud Hub, adding better organization, the option to name services yourself, and deeper monitoring for AWS. We have also polished several rough-edged features like the aliasing (Host Identity) and Blacklisting that are useful in Cloud Hub deployments. We did a major upgrade to NeDi, and added some features to make it more useful. We added a Hit List dashboard, and repaired and enhanced the Seurat View portlet.

We killed a lot of bugs and updated Perl, several libraries, and our HTTPS/TLS support, and closed all the security vulnerabilities we could find. We also prepared for a lot of new integrations and enhancements we will be adding in future point releases.

Overall we think this release will run smoother and be more fully functional than 7.1.0. Now, let's talk about the details.

Cloud Hub 2.2

The CloudHub connectors have all been updated to support custom service names. This means you can change the service name from the dotted path variable name it has by default to something more meaningful to you and your staff. Note that changes to the names of services will affect the performance configurations, so make sure you copy those to the new service names you make.

The AWS connector has additionally been updated to support custom CloudWatch metrics. Anything you put into the CloudWatch API can be a service in GroundWork now. Also, the content has been re-organized to better represent the structure of monitored systems in the AWS cloud. There are better associations between the hosts (instances) it sets up and the EBS volumes it monitors, and the RDS assignments are also associated with the instances that use them.

The AWS connector now also supports assigning hostgroups in GroundWork with tag values in AWS.

Security Improvements

Following multiple security reviews, we have updated several areas of system configuration focusing on the following areas:

• XSS
• SCSS
• CSRF
• Weaker Cipher Suites

We have upgraded several libraries to enhance security and close specific areas of the above vulnerabilities. We now support HTTPS with TLS 1.2 only (by default), and use only strong ciphers. We have given Groundwork customers the ability to enable mod_security if so desired, hardening the server for customers in a high security environment.  Groundwork has taken the time to close known vulnerabilities related to the above bullets. We have also removed the "Manage Configuration" page from the Foundation Administration to prevent inadvertent configuration changes.

New "Hit List" Dashboard

We included a new bespoke dashboard as a portlet application in 7.1.1. You will see it in the dashboard list in new installs, and you can add it as a shared dashboard after upgrade. See the GroundWork Portlets page for details.

Component Upgrades

With the release of GroundWork Monitor 7.1.1, many components have been upgraded to the latest available versions. The following list shows the new version of the key components that have been updated with the GWME 7.1.1 release:

• Perl 5.24
  The distribution of Perl that we incorporate into the release has been upgraded from version 5.8.9 to version 5.24.0.
  The structure of add-on packages that GroundWork includes, outside of the Perl Core, has been shifted. Previously, we used a site_perl path to deliver such packages. That made it difficult to distinguish the packages that GroundWork delivers from packages that a site might add later on. With the new Perl release, we now use a vendor_perl path to deliver such packages. This is standard practice in the Perl community for a vendor-supplied distribution. Modules which are later added by a site should continue to use the site_perl path as before, making it easy to identify such additions. Per modern Perl standards, the default @INC setting has been adjusted so it will search site_perl before vendor_perl, and vendor_perl before the Perl Core library locations.
  A small set of additional Perl modules that we have historically found useful is now included in the distribution. Most notable among them is Devel::NYTProf, which is an excellent tool for profiling Perl programs.

• NeDi 1.6.100 release (plus patches)
  The NeDi component in this release is enhanced with Policies, a powerful way to use NeDi to track when changes occur in your network, and to tell you about them. It also leverages this capability along with nfsen (http://nfsen.sourceforge.net/) to monitor Neflow/Sflow traffic patterns, and display them using tabular and sankey graphics pages. There are other enhancements to NeDi discovery and monitoring, and we have added a NeDi import schema to the Automation section of GroundWork to facilitate rapid deployments. For those using NeDi monitoring, you can use the new (beta) NeDi feeder to send data to GroundWork displays.

• Cacti
  Cacti is bundled with GroundWork 7.1.1 as with prior versions. It now includes three new Cacti plugins. Details of installation and use in the GroundWork context are provided in the Cacti Plugins page.
  1. Aggregate. For instructions, see the plugin home page at http://docs.cacti.net/plugin:aggregate and the full manual at http://docs.cacti.net/_media/plugin:aggregate_manual_v075.pdf.
  2. Realtime. For instructions, see the plugin home page at http://docs.cacti.net/plugin:realtime. Note the system-loading aspects of this plugin, as described in the Usage section of the plugin's home page.
  3. Nectar. For instructions, see the plugin home page at http://docs.cacti.net/plugin:nectar.

GroundWork Distributed Monitoring Agents (GDMA)

The Linux GDMA agent installers included in GWMEE 7.1.1 have been upgraded to the GDMA 2.5.0 release, which has these improvements:

• TLS 1.2 support. As required by most audited organizations, TLS 1.2 support is enabled in GDMA 2.5.0. Note that you will need to transition your GroundWork 7.1.1 server to HTTPS, and then update the GDMA to this version and configure it (including adding certificates) to enable the more secure configuration. Earlier releases of GDMA that included HTTPS support restricted the protocol to TLS 1.0, so that older protocol must remain acceptable until all GDMA clients have been upgraded. See How to enable SSL support and Using GDMA with HTTPS for details.

GDMA 2.5.0 installers for the those platforms not upgraded and bundled into the 7.1.1 release will be provided separately, shortly after the 7.1.1 release is available.

Some other minor enhancements:

• The check_casperjs.pl plugin has been added to our distribution to allow the replay of resurectio scripts, which are an effective way of performing synthetic user testing on web applications.
• The Seurat View portlet used on the Enterprise View dashboard has been re-worked. While previously, items with non-ok states would flash for 15 minutes, the time that a given state change will cause the item to flash is now configurable. Also, the behavior has changed so that no items flash on initial load, but will begin to show the flashing state after the first update (one minute cycle). This means if you navigate away and then back to a dashboard with the Seurat view portlet displayed (e.g., drill down to a flashing host), then come back to the view, the flashing state may take up to 60 seconds to appear. For this reason we suggest drill down be done using a separate window or browser tab.
  You can also now set the time that a "recently recovered" host stays green, as well as individual flash times for various states. See parameters related to

  portal.statusviewer.seurat

  in file

  /usr/local/groundwork/config/status-viewer.properties

  for details.

• The common/bin/sendEmail script has been upgraded to force the use of a TLS 1.2 connection if a TLS connection is supported by the remote end of the connection. See the -o tls option on the command line for details.

Important issues fixed:

• Archiving of data from the Foundation (gwcollagedb) runtime database into a separate archive database was inadvertently broken in the 7.1.0 release. That functionality is now restored in the 7.1.1 release. A principal benefit is that the runtime database is regularly kept pruned and small, leading to better system performance.
• The archiving process has been improved. It will now retain in the runtime database certain event markers which are important in creating host and service availability graphs, in spite of those markers otherwise being sufficiently old that they would have otherwise been purged.
• Tooling is available to recover such markers from the archive database and put them back into the runtime database, thereby restoring the ability to show availability data for hosts and services whose status has been stable for a long time.
• The VMware connector for Cloud Hub was responsible for a memory leak condition on some instances of Vcenter. This has been addressed in CloudHub 2.2.

Some other minor functional issues fixed:

• The Nagios CGI Hosts screen and Service Detail screen were inadvertently broken in the 7.0.0 through 7.0.2 releases, in that the on-screen "Limit results" menu was not operative. This has now been corrected, and there is a configuration option for it (Nagios cgi configuration, CGI Content Options, Result limit).
• The display of plaintext config files under "Configuration > Tools > Export to files" was inadvertently broken in the 7.1.0 release. That is now fixed.
• The space available in the database for day-of-the-week time-period hours has been extended from a max of 255 characters to a max of 400 characters, to accommodate some unusually complex customer setups.

SECTION 2 - KNOWN ISSUES AND LIMITATIONS

Upgrade Issues

HTTPS -- Installations on 7.1.0 configured for HTTPS will be reverted to HTTP on upgrade. Your certificates will stay undisturbed, but you will need to re-do some of the HTTPS setup.

RAPID Feeders -- When upgrading to 7.1.1 the installer does not restore various RAPID/Feeder-based feeder files in the /usr/local/groundwork/config directory or symlinks in /usr/local/groundwork/logs. You will need to do this manually if you are using the Cacti or LogBridge feeders in non-default configurations. See the Post-upgrade tasks in the Installing or Upgrading to GroundWork Monitor 7.1.1 page for details. -- GWMON-12764

JBOSS Portal root user -- The installer when upgrading to 7.1.1 does not restore any custom portal root user name definition that was in the gatein.properties file. See the Post-upgrade tasks in the Installing or Upgrading to GroundWork Monitor 7.1.1 page for details.

Log Bridge -- The upgrade of a 7.1.0 system with Log Bridge installed has several post-upgrade tasks detailed in the following page: Post-upgrade tasks for Log Bridge installations

Limitations and Work-Arounds

Noma -- NoMa has around 1 minute latency in reporting notifications. This can be adjusted.

Ubuntu -- Running on Ubuntu 12.04 is not recommended because it will be EOLd by Canonical in April 2017.

SECTION 3 - ANNOUNCEMENTS AS OF VERSION 7.1.1

Supported Versions of GroundWork

GroundWork Monitor versions 7.0 and 7.0.1 are now end-of-life. Customers using older versions are advised to contact GroundWork Support regarding upgrade options.

GroundWork Monitor version 7.0.2 will be end-of-life with the next release.

Linux Supported Versions

SuSE Enterprise Linux (SLES):

• Support for SLES 11 & 12
• Recommended version: SLES 12

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL):

• Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x is available as of this release.
• Recommended version: RHEL 7

Ubuntu LTS

• Support for Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04 & 16.04 LTS releases.
• Recommended version: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Supported Architectures

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise only supports installation on 64-bit platforms. Monitored nodes can be 32-bit or 64-bit but GroundWork itself must be deployed to 64-bit.

Browser Compatibility

This version of GroundWork has been tested with the latest versions of Firefox and Google Chrome, as well as Internet Explorer 10 & 11.

SECTION 4 - DETAILS OF FIXED ISSUES SINCE RELEASE 7.1.0

This section summarizes the individual issues fixed since release 7.1.0. There are a lot of these, but if you have seen one of them and opened a support case, you should have the associated issue key in that case, which you can use to cross reference here and know that it is fixed in 7.1.1.

If you are wondering about whether an issue you have seen is fixed in this release, open a case and we will be able to tell you specifically.

SECTION 5 - ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Copyright 2004-2016 GroundWork Open Source, Inc. ("GroundWork"). All rights reserved. Use is subject to GroundWork commercial license terms. GroundWork Monitor products are released under the terms of the various public and commercial licenses. For information on licensing and open source elements please see [Licenses used in GroundWork]. GroundWork, GroundWork Open Source, GroundWork Monitor Professional, GroundWork Monitor Open Source, GroundWork Community Edition, GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, GroundWork Foundation, GroundWork Status Viewer, Monarch, and GroundWork Guava are trademarks of GroundWork Open Source, Inc. Other trademarks, logos and service marks (each, a "Mark") used in GroundWork’s products, including Nagios, which is a registered trademark of Ethan Galstad, are the property of other third parties. These Marks may not be used without the prior written consent of GroundWork Open Source or the third party that owns the respective Mark.