SL1 AP2 Biscotti version 8.0.20 Release

The Biscotti release for AP2 version 8.0.20 includes feature enhancements to the Service Investigator, Business Services, and Event Investigator pages, and new ways to visualize and access device data on the Dashboards page.

AP2 releases are separate from SL1 platform releases to provide updates and improvements more frequently.

This release includes the following new features and enhancements:

New Service Investigator page layout and data viewing capabilities for Business Services
New ways of viewing, accessing, and managing device data on the Dashboards page
New Event Investigator page layout and data viewing capabilities for all recorded events.

These release notes provide a comprehensive list of the features, enhancements, and addressed issues that are included in this release.

Before You Install or Upgrade

Ensure you are running version 12.1.1 or later of SL1 before installing AP2 Biscotti.

For details on upgrading SL1, see the appropriate SL1 Platform Release Notes.

The AP2 Biscotti update must be administered to systems that host AP2 and are on the same AP2 version. If your SL1 system is not running version 12.2.0 or later, this update will only be available to cloud-based (SaaS) SL1 systems. The minimum required version for the AP2 Biscotti update on platform is 12.1.1 and OL8.

Installing or Uninstalling AP2 Biscotti

If you are running version 12.1.1 of SL1, you will need to install both the AP2 Biscotti version 8.0.20 and the EM7 RPM files. To do so, follow the instructions outlined below:

You do not need to perform the following steps if you are running version 12.2.0 or later of SL1. The minimum required version to install Biscotti is 12.1.1, which requires you to download and install the lib-em7 and AP2 Biscotti RPM files.

Download the lib-em7 RPM file locally from AWS: https://sciencelogicportalfiles.s3.amazonaws.com/ap2/libem7-ipcserver-0.2.0-1.el8.x86_64.rpm
Either go to the console of the SL1 Database Server or use SSH to access the Database Server.
At the shell prompt, copy the RPM file to the AWS system by running the following command:

scp -i <aws-system-pem>.pem -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no libem7-ipcserver-0.2.0-1.el8.X86_64.rpm em7admin@<system-ip-address>:/home/em7admin/

where:

aws-system-pem is the PEM file for the AWS system.
system-ip-address is the IP address of your SL1 system.

Download the AP2 RPM file locally from AWS: https://support.sciencelogic.com/s/release-file/aBt4z000000GsH0CAK/biscotti
Either go to the console of the SL1 Database Server or use SSH to access the Database Server.
At the shell prompt, copy the RPM file to the AWS system by running the following command:

scp -i <aws-system-pem>.pem -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no nextui-<biscotti-release-ap2-version>.rpm em7admin@<system-ip-address>:/home/em7admin/

where:

aws-system-pem is the PEM file for the AWS system.
biscotti-release-ap2-version is the AP2 Biscotti release version.
system-ip-address is the IP address of your SL1 system.

Install the AP2 RPM file on your device by running the following command:

sudo yum install nextui-<biscotti-release-ap2-version>.rpm

where biscotti-release-ap2-version is the AP2 Biscotti release version.

Enter y to confirm the installation of the AP2 Release RPM file.
Install the lib-em7 RPM file on your device by running the following command:

sudo yum install libem7-ipserver-0.2.0-1.e18.x86_64.rpm

Enter y to confirm the installation of the lib-em7 RPM file.
After the installation of both RPM files is complete, run the following commands to reload the daemon service:

sudo systemctl start libem7

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Restart the NextUI service by running the following command:

sudo systemctl restart nextui.service

AP2 will be inaccessible for a few minutes after restarting the NextUI service.

To uninstall the Biscotti release features for AP2 version 8.0.20:

Download the 12.1.1 AP2 RPM Rollback file locally from AWS: https://sciencelogicportalfiles.s3.amazonaws.com/ap2/nextui-7.0.0-12.1.0.1_r351.b3e6a2730a1.0.release.x86_64.rpm.
Either go to the console of the SL1 Database Server or use SSH to access the Database Server.
At the shell prompt, copy the RPM file to the AWS system by running the following command:

scp -i <aws-system-pem>.pem -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no nextui-<rollback-ap2-version>.rpm em7admin@<system-ip-address>:/home/em7admin/

where:

aws-system-pem is the PEM file for the AWS system.
rollback-ap2-version is the Rollback AP2 Biscotti (12.1 GA build AP2) version.
system-ip-address is the IP address of your SL1 system.

Install the RPM file on your device by running the following command:

sudo rpm -U --force --replacefiles <ga-ap2-releaseVersion>.rpm

After the installation is complete, run the following commands to reload the daemon service: and restart the NextUI service:

sudo systemctl stop libem7

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Restart the NextUI service by running the following command:

sudo systemctl restart nextui.service

New Features and Enhancements in AP2 Biscotti version 8.0.20

This section describes the features and enhancements that are included in SL1 AP2 Biscotti version 8.0.20.

Business Services

What's new: A new Service Investigator page. The Service Investigator page has been redesigned. The following updates were made to support this new feature:
- The Health, Availability, Risk, and Anomalies widgets have been merged into new, single, consolidated pane at the bottom of the Service Investigator page. This pane has the following tabs:
  - The Events tab remains the same, displaying a list of events for the chosen service or device.
  - The Changes tab is now enabled by default. This tab was previously disabled by default.
  - The RCA tab contains the Root Cause Analysis, which shows what is causing a device or a service to be unhealthy based on the Status Policy.
  - The Log Insights tab displays a list of Zebrium events.
  - The Metric Anomalies tab, which was previously the Anomalies widget, displays a list of all devices within the selected services that have anomaly detection enabled.
- A new information bar at the top of the Service Investigator page displays organization and system information such as Contact Organization, Visible Organization, and Owner. This information bar also displays a preview of the sunburst chart, which you can click to see a more detailed breakdown of the Health, Availability, and Risk statuses of your devices.
- There is now also a Timeline widget, which displays swim lanes and bar graphs to show Historical, Change, Health, Availability, Risk, and Zebrium events. You can select any time range on the graph to display the Changes, Health, Availability, and Risk information specific to your chosen device or service in that selected time range.
  
  Swim lanes are visual flowcharts that show a process from start to finish for an event.

You must be running SL1 version 12.2.0 or later to view the new Service Investigator page. This page is disabled by default on both SL1 versions 12.1.0 and 12.2.0. Follow the instructions in these release notes to enable or disable the new Service Investigator page: Using the New Service Investigator.

Additional Business Services Updates

Added a Status column to the Business Services page that indicates if a service is Enabled or Disabled. You can change the status of your services by clicking the Actions button () for the service and selecting either Enable or Disable.

Events

What's new: A new Event Investigator page. The Event Investigator page has been redesigned. The following additional updates were made to support this new feature:
- Added the following new widgets to the Event Investigator page:
  - The Event Overview widget appears at the top of the page and displays information about the organization, device, event, and the time the event was detected.
  - The Event Policy Information widget displays information about the relevant event policy, such as the name of the event policy and its description.
  - The Logs Related to this Event widget displays every occurrence event log that is associated with the selected event.
  - The Device Details widget displays relevant device information such as its Collection State, Uptime, Active Events, Device Category, Device Class, and more.
- Renamed the Note and Logs widgets to Event Note and Device Logs, respectively.

Made the following updates to support Zebrium suggestions and alerts:
- Added Zebrium options to the Event Type column on the Events page for any events that correspond with the Root Cause Report (RCR). There are now three Zebrium event types available: "Zebrium - Suggestion", "Zebrium - Accepted", "Zebrium - Custom".

You must be running SL1 version 12.2.0 or later to view the new Event Investigator page. This page is enabled by default on both SL1 versions 12.1.0 and 12.2.0.

Additional New Features and Enhancements for Biscotti

Anomaly Detection

The Anomaly Detection column on the Machine Learning page in SL1 displays the message "Waiting for Status" when anomaly detection for a metric lacks sufficient data. This might happen either because anomaly detection requires at least one day of monitoring or the data for the metric is irregular.

Dashboards

The "SL1 Default Dashboards Base Pack" PowerPack now contains the new SL1 Home Dashboard page, which can be set as your default landing page.

Generating a PDF of your chosen dashboard will now print on a single page.

Device Management

The Device Investigator page can now display events from Zebrium. You can now see "Zebrium - Accepted", "Zebrium - Custom", and "Zebrium - Suggestion" in the Event Source column on the Events tab of the Device Investigator page.

The Device Overview widget on the Device Investigator page now displays at full width. This change ensures that all of the content is displayed correctly in the widget.

Global Manager

The ability to view global Business Services is now enabled by default in Global Manager mode.

GraphQL

The following updates were made for GraphQL:

SL1 agents can now use API tokens to authenticate to the "Streamer" service that runs on SL1 Compute Node clusters. As part of this effort, you can use the following new GraphQL mutations to create, update, and delete agent token GUIDs and secret keys in the database:

createAgentTokenSecret
updateAgentTokenSecret
deleteAgentTokenSecret
deleteAgentTokenSecrets

If you use the mutation "updateAgentTokenSecret" on an agent that does not already have a token, the system will create a token for that agent and add it to the database.

Added a more efficient GraphQL field, "aiMachineLearningMetricAnomalies" to device queries for systems running SL1 version 12.2.0 or later.
Updated the "AgentTokenSecret" GQL mutation to use correct organization names by removing the "TokenSecret" queries entirely.
Added a "alignedDeviceInvestigatorLayout" node to the device API.
Added a new field on queries that return the "LogAlert" type to report the time the Zebrium alert was created.
Changed time-related arguments to the "logAlertCandidates" query to filter by when alerts are created.
Added a "systeminformation" GraphQL query that returns the current SL1 Classic (EM7) version number in the field "em7Version."

Made the following updates in GraphQL to support Zebrium service connections:
- Added the field "relatedEvents" to the "LogAlert" type. When you query for log alerts by event IDs, this field will return details about related events and their aligned devices, allowing you to see which devices are impacted by the issues identified in the Root Cause Analysis report.
- Added a new "analytics" service connection type to support the Analytics Platform integration.

User Interface

SL1 will now automatically sign you out of your account if you remain inactive for a certain period. This inactivity period is set to 10 minutes by default, but this setting can be changed on the Behavior Settings page (System > Settings > Behavior) in the User Login Session Timeout field.

Issues Addressed in SL1 AP2 Biscotti version 8.0.20

This section describes the issues that were addressed in SL1 AP2 Biscotti version 8.0.20

Dashboards

Resolved issues that were causing dashboard widgets with Table visualizations to not display columns in the selected order nor with the correct defined values.

Events

Resolved an issue in which the Events page was displaying only events that had a severity of "Notice" after upgrading SL1 from version 11.3.1 to 12.1.0. (Case: 00365477)

Using the New Service Investigator

You can permanently enable or disable the new Service Investigator page through the nextui.conf file or temporarily enable or disable through GQL mutations.

Enabling The Service Investigator Page

To permanently enable the new Service Investigator page and the ServiceNow or RestorePoint swim lane diagrams on the new Timeline widget:

Use SSH to access the SL1 appliance.
Using vi or another text editor, edit the /opt/em7/nextui/nextui.conf file. To do so, enter the following at the shell prompt:

sudo vi /opt/em7/nextui/nextui.conf
Add the following line at the bottom of the nextui.conf file:

_AP2_BUSINESS_SERVICES_INVESTIGATOR=enabled
AP2_BUSINESS_SERVICES_SERVICENOW=enabled
AP2_BUSINESS_SERVICES_RESTOREPOINT=enabled

Alternatively, you can temporarily enable these new features via GraphQL. To do so:

To temporarily enable the new Service Investigator page:

Access the GraphiQL interface by typing the URL or IP address for SL1 in a browser, add /gql to the end of the URL or IP address, and press Enter.
To temporarily enable the new Service Investigator page, type the following mutation in the main query pane:

mutation investigatorPage {
  updateFeatureToggle(id: "system:_AP2_BUSINESS_SERVICES_INVESTIGATOR", value: "enabled") {
    id
    value
  }
}

To temporarily enable the ServiceNow swim lane diagrams on the new Timeline widget, type the following mutation:

mutation updateServiceNowSwimLane {
  updateFeatureToggle(id: "system:_AP2_BUSINESS_SERVICES_SERVICENOW", value: "enabled") {
    id
    value
  }
}

To temporarily enable the RestorePoint swim lane diagrams on the new Timeline widget, type the following mutation:

mutation updateRestorePointSwimLane {
  updateFeatureToggle(id: "system:_AP2_BUSINESS_SERVICES_RESTOREPOINT", value: "enabled") {
    id
    value
  }
}

After you have enabled or disabled the new Service Investigator page via GraphQL mutations, refresh the page or sign out and sign back into your account. If the nextui service restarts, all GraphQL feature toggles will also need to restart. To make changes permanent, modify the nextui.conf file in the instructions outlined below.

Disabling The Service Investigator Page

To permanently disable the new Service Investigator page and the ServiceNow or RestorePoint swim lane diagrams on the new Timeline widget:

Use SSH to access the SL1 appliance.
Using vi or another text editor, edit the /opt/em7/nextui/nextui.conf file. To do so, enter the following at the shell prompt:

sudo vi /opt/em7/nextui/nextui.conf
Add the following line at the bottom of the nextui.conf file:

_AP2_BUSINESS_SERVICES_INVESTIGATOR=disabled
AP2_BUSINESS_SERVICES_SERVICENOW=disabled
AP2_BUSINESS_SERVICES_RESTOREPOINT=disabled

Alternatively, you can temporarily disable these new features via GraphQL. To do so:

To temporarily enable the new Service Investigator page:

Access the GraphiQL interface by typing the URL or IP address for SL1 in a browser, add /gql to the end of the URL or IP address, and press Enter.
To temporarily disable the new Service Investigator page, type the following mutation in the main query pane:

mutation investigatorPage {
  updateFeatureToggle(id: "system:_AP2_BUSINESS_SERVICES_INVESTIGATOR", value: "disabled") {
    id
    value
  }
}

To temporarily disable the ServiceNow swim lane diagrams on the new Timeline widget, type the following mutation:

mutation updateServiceNowSwimLane {
  updateFeatureToggle(id: "system:_AP2_BUSINESS_SERVICES_SERVICENOW", value: "disabled") {
    id
    value
  }
}

To temporarily disable the RestorePoint swim lane diagrams on the new Timeline widget, type the following mutation:

mutation updateRestorePointSwimLane {
  updateFeatureToggle(id: "system:_AP2_BUSINESS_SERVICES_RESTOREPOINT", value: "disabled") {
    id
    value
  }
}

Known Issues

The following known issues affect version 8.0.20 of the AP2 Biscotti release:

Organizations must have at least one or more accounts assigned to them to ensure the relevant services are saved.
Services that are added or created to the N-tier hierarchy have their RCA Options field set to Disabled by default.

The current solution to this issue is to edit the service you wish to configure by manually updating the RCA Options field to RCA Enabled (contributors only).

For services that have their RCA Options field enabled, and has had a child service removed, SL1 will not compute the health, availability, and risk values until the Service Topology Engine returns an updated topology, which occurs every 5 minutes by default.

Before deleting child services in a 3-tier hierarchy, check if the parent service has the RCA Options field Enabled, then set this field to Disabled if it is not already.