Release Date: January 31, 2020
Welcome to version 4.10 of our NetEye v4 Unified Monitoring Solution. The new and updated features in this version focus mainly on the new Asset Management module, the support of Beat agents in the SIEM feature module, the Shutdown Manager module GUI, and the improvements to the Service Level Management module.
The complete changelog, which includes all fixed issues, can be generated on demand by following the instructions in the updated NetEye documentation.
To begin the upgrade, please follow the instructions in your current NetEye version at User Guide > Upgrading and Updating.
New Features
Asset Management – new Feature Module
From this release on, a new NetEye feature module called NetEye Asset will be available. It consists of OCS inventory NG and GLPI, two of the leading open source IT asset management and inventory solutions. This will allow you to automate the inventorization of both Hard- and Software of your whole IT Infrastructure. For a detailed collection of information, agents are available for all major, and many minor operating systems readily available to be deployed to your existing Infrastructure.
Tornado – Processing Structured Data
Events containing structured data in their payload, for example tables or lists, can now be processed more efficiently. You can email Tornado a plain text table containing services and states. This table can be used natively to send a passive check result to Icinga2 for each single line (or any other Action you wish) by using a single Rule. Whenever using structured data in an action, you can choose to address these cells either by column name or index.
Improvements
Service Level Management – Outages
The SLM Reports provided by the NetEye Service Level Management Module offer now the capability to get an overview over Outages which affected the Availability of your Monitored Objects. You can now intuitively explore Monitoring Events causing such Outages via links in your browser.
Service Level Management – Report legend
The SLM module now contains a legend in SLM reports, which explains the meaning of colors and labels.
Audit Log – Date-based search
In the Audit Log, it is now possible to search for activities performed on a specific date.
Shutdown Manager – GUI
NetEye now provides a GUI for the Shutdown Manager module, from which it is now possible to easily configure and manage the components of the module and to check the outcome of the completed Shutdown processes.
Tornado – Clusterization
Tornado is now split into multiple cluster-aware components, each one running as a separate cluster resource.
This improves Tornado resiliency and allows collectors to run on different nodes of a NetEye cluster.
Tornado – Example Rules
Please note that from this release on, new installations of Tornado will no longer have example rules enabled automatically.
SIEM – Beats integration
Beats are data shippers that you install as agents on your servers to send operational data to Elasticsearch.
As part of our SIEM feature module, NetEye can now receive data from Beat agents installed on monitored hosts. Logstash on NetEye listens for all incoming data from Beat agents and then indexes them in Elasticsearch.
The main characteristics of the feature are:
- Secure channel for all communications: all logs sent from agents to Logstash and from Logstash to Elasticsearch are over SSL.
- Existing NetEye Log Management architecture is preserved: event logs coming from Beat agents are written on disk in JSON format, encrypted and signed to preserve their integrity.
- Many sources supported: NetEye supports all Beats included in Elastic Platinum subscription which provides data collection from all major data sources on the net like cloud services, network devices, and databases (see the Elastic official documentation).
- Built-in dashboards for Kibana: all Beat-provided data are collected preserving the original format in order to allow the usage of Beat’s dashboards.
- Although Beat agents communicate through Logstash, Beat agent indexed data are fully compliant with Elastic Common Scheme and other Elastic Stack default settings (e.g., Index Lifecycle Management).
Module Updates
- DRBD from 9.0.16 to 9.0.21.
- MariaDB from 5.5.6 to 10.3.13. Before upgrading, it is mandatory to verify the configuration in case of custom settings, which may have been removed or renamed by this major upgrade. Check the official MariaDB documentation page for further information.
CentOS Updates and Upgrades Process within NetEye 4
NetEye base OS packages published in the official public repository are updated on a regular weekly basis. Indeed, the latest updates available of the current minor CentOS release are fetched and tested within Wuerth Phoenix testing area; after a week of successful testing, they are released to the public. Also, the published NetEye ISO is updated during this regular weekly process.
CentOS minor upgrades are delivered after an extended testing phase during the release cycle currently in progress.
If the testing phase is successful, the CentOS minor upgrade is published on the repo for the current minor release.
Also, the NetEye ISO is updated accordingly.
Additional information about CentOS versioning is available in the official documentation.
Thomas Forrer
Author
