Several weeks ago, we announced the availability of OpenText Operations Bridge 2023.05, our AIOps platform. Our latest release introduces the new versions of the Operations Bridge Classic, Container and SaaS deployments and is packed with features that improve observability, simplify use, strengthen security and cut costs. This blog post focuses on the changes in the Hyperscale Observability capability. This article is the third in a series of blogs introducing Operations Bridge 2023.05. For information on the new releases of Operations Bridge Manager (OBM) and SiteScope, check the blog article What’s New in Operations Bridge Manager and SiteScope 2023.05. Other new features that are part of Containerized Operations Bridge are described in What’s New in Operations Bridge Reporting, Application Monitoring and Agentless Monitoring.

Summary of changes in Operations Bridge Hypersale Observability

Cloud Monitoring

• More Microsoft Azure/Amazon Web Services (AWS) services and Kubernetes objects are now monitored:
  • Azure Advanced monitoring: Extended with three new monitored services – Virtual WAN, SQL Managed Instance and PostgreSQL
  • Azure and AWS Essential monitoring: Added support for additional 75 Azure services and 10 AWS services
  • AWS: You can now receive AWS health dashboard notifications in OBM
  • Kubernetes: You can now monitor four common containerized applications – PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Kafka and Redis
  • Completed monitoring of all Kubernetes objects by adding Kubernetes resource monitoring for Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) and CronJob
• New AWS troubleshooting page for Cloud Subject Matter Experts providing a guided workflow for faster troubleshooting
• Improved functionality:
  • AWS/Azure: You can now view CloudWatch alarms with tags in OBM
  • Better prioritization of Cloud Monitoring events using cloud tags 
  • Cloud alarm events are mapped to corresponding Configuration Items (CIs) 
  • AWS/Azure/Kubernetes: Generated events now set Health Indicators 

Monitoring Control Center (MCC) administrator enhancements

• All Kubernetes monitoring configuration can now be performed from the UI
• The possibility to enable/disable out-of-the-box thresholding and corresponding event generation
• The new option to immediately start metric collection using the new configuration rather than wait for the next cycle
• Cloud Monitoring out-of-the-box dashboards are now editable
• Easier administration of multiple Cloud Monitoring deployments
• Credentials, targets and monitors can now be logically grouped

Virtualization Monitoring

• You can now discover and monitor on-premises VMware environments. The first release integrates VMware events and displays them in the OBM Event Browser.

For more details, please see the Containerized Operations Bridge Release notes. For detailed information on supported components, versions, software and hardware requirements, as well as obsolescence announcements, take a look at the latest Operations Bridge support matrices.

Changes in Cloud Monitoring

Support for additional services for Microsoft Azure/Amazon Web Services and Kubernetes objects

Starting from this release, we offer you a sample file to generate the content for some services that are not covered by Advanced Monitoring. This content file currently covers 15 AWS services and 79 Azure services. After the content is created, you can configure the collector to collect and send metrics to the OPTIC Data Lake (DL). You can use these metrics to create your own Performance Troubleshooter or Flex dashboards. For more information, see Generate your own content for Essential Monitoring.

Another small but useful enhancement is that you can now send AWS Health events to OBM and view them in the OBM Event Browser. For more information, see Send AWS health events to OBM.

We have also extended Azure Advanced Monitoring by introducing monitoring for Virtual WAN, SQL Managed Instance and PostgreSQL services. Note that AWS and Azure services not covered by Advanced Monitoring can be monitored using Essential Monitoring. For more information, see AWS Essential Monitoring and Azure Essential Monitoring.

For Kubernetes, we now deliver complete monitoring of all Kubernetes infrastructure objects by having added resource monitoring for HPA and CronJob. See Supported Kubernetes objects for a complete list.

In addition, we have introduced support for monitoring common Kubernetes containerized applications. This means that you can now configure the Kubernetes collector to collect metrics from PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, Kafka and Redis applications and store them in the OPTIC DL. You can visualize application metrics using Performance Troubleshooting dashboards, out-of-the-box Flex dashboards or your own custom Flex dashboards.

For a sample use case, see Use case for Kubernetes Application Monitoring.

Guided AWS troubleshooting workflow for faster troubleshooting

In this release, we offer a new AWS troubleshooting page, which allows you to view the status of your AWS resources based on tags. Inside your collection configuration, you can now specify tag-based CI collection keys. This allows you to assess which tags are relevant to you and which tags you want to use to organize your cloud data.

Example: You can use the tag app and the tag owner if you want to organize your cloud data so that you can see if there are problems for every application and for every owner. This of course assumes that you properly tagged your cloud resources.

Once the tagging is done, you will see the following on the AWS troubleshooting page:

Figure 1. The AWS troubleshooting page sample

In the Watch List section of the UI, there is one entry for every monitored application and one entry for every owner. In the above screenshot, you can see a watch list showing the status of two applications and seven owners. You can click on these watch list items to see which CIs belong to the selected owner or the selected application and view their status. Related events are displayed in the Event Browser.

Note: There is also a General Tag collection which contains all CIs that neither have an application nor an owner tag.

If you want to analyze an event, you can drill down into the Event Details page to see more information on what caused the event to occur.

Figure 2. The Event Details page with additional useful information

Here, you can view the event summary and related metrics. Typically, one metric violation has triggered the event, but additional metrics are displayed as well. Viewing their values may help you understand if there is a certain correlation pattern.

The instance details at the bottom provide a little snapshot with the information about the related CI that had the event. There is also a link that you can click to display all cloud tags of the CI.

Note: If you have Operations Orchestration runbooks configured to remediate AWS issues, you can launch these using the Remediate button, which brings up the Action Launcher.  

If needed, you can also view the full event details of the event – these appear on the side panel. You can also drill down into the EC2 Operations Bridge dashboard if you want to compare the situation with other EC2 instances to see if there are similarities.

Miscellaneous improvements in Cloud Monitoring

• AWS/Azure: You can now view CloudWatch alarms as Cloud Monitoring events with cloud tags in the OBM Event Browser. This feature facilitates prioritization of events based on tags. For more information, see Integrate CloudWatch alarms with tags and Integrate Azure alerts with tags.
• AWS: CloudWatch alarm events are now mapped to corresponding CIs

Figure 3. CloudWatch events mapped to CIs

• AWS/Azure/Kubernetes: Generated events now set Health Indicators. For more information, see AWS threshold configuration, Azure threshold configuration and Kubernetes threshold configuration.

MCC/Cloud Monitoring UI and administration enhancements

• Starting from this release, you can use the Cloud Monitoring UI for the end-to-end Kubernetes configuration. You can create and manage credentials and credential groups, create and manage targets and target groups, manage thresholds, as well as create, edit and delete Kubernetes monitors and monitor groups. To create thresholds and schedules please, use the ops-monitoring-ctl CLI. For more information, see Manage Kubernetes monitoring configurations using Cloud Monitoring UI.
• You can now disable out-of-the-box thresholding and corresponding event generation for AWS, Azure and Kubernetes monitors. This is useful in situations when you just want to collect metrics, but you are not interested in thresholding and you do not want to create any threshold violation events.

Figure 4. Enabling and disabling thresholds from the Cloud Monitoring UI

You can also enable and disable thresholds using the ops-monitoring-ctl CLI, where we introduced two new options: --no-static-thresholds and --no-dynamic-thresholds. For details, see, Manage monitoring configurations for AWS using Parameters, Manage monitoring configurations for Azure using Parameters and Manage monitoring configurations for Kubernetes using Parameters.

• The new --run-now option of the ops-monitoring-ctl CLI allows you to start an immediate metric collection after you have applied configuration changes, without having to wait for the next scheduled run. If the collection is already in progress, the collector will run after the current collection cycle ends. For details, see Manage monitoring configurations for AWS using Parameters, Manage monitoring configurations for Azure using Parameters and Manage monitoring configurations for Kubernetes using Parameters.
• You can now modify out-of-the-box Cloud Monitoring dashboards by editing the underlying queries. You can also use these queries to create your own dashboards.

Figure 5. Editable Cloud Monitoring dashboards

To simplify administration of multiple Cloud Monitoring deployments for production and test purposes, the ops-monitoring-ctl CLI now provides the new context parameter to group access parameters under an easily recognizable name in a monitoring configuration file. This file is used to configure access to a particular Operations Bridge deployment used by ops-monitoring-ctl. For more information, see the CLI to manage context section of Manage monitoring configurations for AWS using Parameters, Manage monitoring configurations for Azure using Parameters and Manage monitoring configurations for Kubernetes using Parameters topics.

• Also, you can now logically organize your content by creating groups or folders for managing credentials, targets and monitors. For details, see Manage AWS monitoring configurations using Cloud Monitoring UI, Manage Azure monitoring configurations using Cloud Monitoring UI and Manage Kubernetes monitoring configurations using Cloud Monitoring UI.

New VMware Virtualization Monitoring

Starting from this release, you can discover and monitor your on-premises VMware environments using a new collector that is part of our container-based Cloud Observability capability. The first edition of our offering enables you to integrate your vCenter alarms into OBM and manage them in the OBM Event Browser. In future releases, we plan to extend this with dashboards and metric collection to replace the VMWare monitoring of Cloud Optimizer.

For a list of VMware alarms that can be integrated, see Manage the Default vCenter Domain Events. Four out-of-the-box views can be used by operators to view the events for different CIs. The new views are described in VMware Topology Views.

Figure 6. Virtualization Monitoring: VMware events in OBM

More Operations Bridge 2023.05 release-related details are provided in the Operations Bridge Release Readiness Webinar. The slides and the recording are available on our Community page here.

We encourage you to try out our new features and enhancements! For further information on our offerings, visit the Operations Bridge product page, explore our documentation resources and check out our videos and blogs.

If you have feedback or suggestions, don’t hesitate to comment on this article.

Explore the full capabilities of Operations Bridge by taking a look at these pages on our Practitioner Portal: Operations Bridge Manager, SiteScope, Operations Agent, Operations Connector (OpsCx), Operations Bridge Analytics, Application Performance Management (APM) and Operations Orchestration (OO).

Events

• On-demand: Operations Bridge 2023.05 Release Readiness Webinar
• On-demand: Operations Bridge Refresh 2023
• On demand: Operations Bridge 2022.05 – Has Observability, More SaaS

See all the OpenText events worldwide. 

Read all our news at the Operations Bridge blog. 

Related items 

• Operations Bridge – SaaS: Automated discovery, monitoring and automation
• Operations Bridge Technology Integrations eBook
• What is AIOps

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