We are pleased to announce the availability of OpenText^TM AI Operations Management 24.4. What's that?  It's easy,  Operations Bridge is now OpenText^TM AI Operations Management. We are renaming products to make it easier to find and understand our solutions as our user base expands beyond our existing customers.

This release brings the new versions of Operations Bridge classic products, our containerized Operations Bridge and SaaS deployments, with numerous new features and usability improvements.

This blog article focuses on what’s new for containerized OpenText AI Operations Management (Operations Bridge) and SaaS deployments.

If you are interested in what’s new in the classic products Operations Bridge Manager (OBM) including OpenText AI Operations Management with Aviator related features, Operations Agent (OA) and SiteScope, please see What’s New in OpenText AI Operations Management CE 24.4 (Classic Edition).

The new release of containerized OpenText AI Operations Management provides enhancements in Agentless Monitoring and Hyperscale Observability (which are also available as part of OpenText Core Infrastructure Observability, see What's new in OpenText Infrastructure Observability) and in the Automatic Event Correlation (AEC) Tuning UI. Additionally, several new AI Operations Management Flex reports are provided. A further highlight: It is now also possible to install our containerized AI Operations Management on Google Platform Cloud (GCP) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Please note that these new containerized AI Operations Management features are also available in our OpenText AI Operations Management SaaS offering, see OpenText AI Operations Management - SaaS - Release Notes.

Summary of changes

Installation

• Deploy on Google Platform Cloud (GCP) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
• Simplified guided installation

Agentless Monitoring

• Quick Report enhancements
• Copy monitors and monitor groups

Hyperscale Observability

New out-of-the-box service overview dashboards for

• AWS Auto Scaling Group (ASG)
• AWS S3
• Azure SQL Database
• Azure SQL Managed Instances
• Azure Virtual Machines

Drill down dashboards in the Kubernetes Resource Summary dashboard

• Kubernetes Persistent Volume list
• Kubernetes Persistent Volume Claims list
• Kubernetes Persistent Volume Claims 

AI Operations Management Reporting

• Synthetic Monitoring reports:
  • Enhanced Synthetic Transaction report for BPM Applications
  • Layer Isolation report
• WebSphere Executive Summary report
• Microsoft Active Directory Executive Summary report

Automatic Event Correlation

• Enhancements in the Automatic Event Correlation (AEC) Tuning UI

OBM

All new features of OBM classic are also available for containerized OBM. For details please see What’s New in OpenText AI Operations Management CE 24.4 (Classic Edition).

Additionally, containerized OBM offers:

• Migrate classic OBM to containerized OBM
• Automated downtime data forwarding to OPTIC DL

Details of the new features

Installation

Deploy on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

This release now supports Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and you can install our containerized AI Operations Management on Google’s managed Kubernetes service Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The preparation of the necessary infrastructure in GPE can be done using our Cloud deployment toolkit. See ITOM Cloud Deployment Toolkit for more information. Once the infrastructure is ready you can deploy AI Operations Management following the Deploy on GCP documentation.

Simplified Guided Installation

We have further simplified our guided installation method, that helps you to deploy if you want to use the embedded Kubernetes that comes with our solution. After the guided installation, when the AppHub is used to deploy our OpenText AI Operations Management suite, all infrastructure-related values are automatically populated based on the inputs provided during the guided installation. This auto population helps avoid manual configuration of infrastructure-related parameters, allowing you to use AppHub to fill in the mandatory parameters based on the selected capabilities.

Refer to the documentation on Auto populate AppHub parameters for details.

Agentless Monitoring

Enhanced Quick Report  

The OpenText SiteScope Quick Report will now be generated using the data from the OPTIC Data Lake (ODL). The metric details of the Quick Report will be from the aggregated data in the ODL. This allows the Quick Report to include data older than 40 days, surpassing the 40-day data retention limit of the classic OpenText SiteScope. This is valid only when OpenText SiteScope is integrated with OpenText AI Operations Management and the OpenText SiteScope data streaming to OPTIC data lake is enabled.

The Quick Report will be generated from OpenText SiteScope if the integration to the OPTIC Data Lake is not enabled.

For details on the Quick Report, metrics and widgets displayed refer to Quick Report documentation

Copy Monitor and Monitor Groups

To replicate the monitor tree structure across different OpenText SiteScope systems (called providers), you can asynchronously copy the monitors and monitor groups. OpenText SiteScope monitors and monitor groups can be duplicated to various locations within a provider and across different providers. Additionally, you can move monitors and groups, along with their contents, to different groups within the monitor hierarchy.

For details see Copy Monitor and Monitor Groups

Hyperscale Observability

New AWS Service Overview Dashboards

With the integration of additional out-of-the-box AWS service dashboards, you’ll be able to monitor more AWS services from a single, centralized location. This release of OpenText AI Operations Management includes out-of-the-box Service Overview dashboard for Auto Scaling Group (ASG) & S3 services, offering users a snapshot of Inventory, Availability, Performance, and a list of the top 10 metrics based on usage. By leveraging these new dashboards, you can gain valuable insights into your AWS services, ensuring smooth operation and efficient management.

Auto Scaling Group (ASG): Service Overview

The ASG (Auto Scaling Group) in AWS allows you to automatically manage the number of Amazon EC2 instances in your application to meet demand and maintain performance. The ASG: Service Overview dashboard gives you an overview of the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group (ASG) service. The ASG contains a collection of EC2 instances. These instances share similar characteristics and are treated as a logical group.

This dashboard acts as a one-stop solution, offering a comprehensive view of your ASG environment. It provides inventory details for groups, regions, and subscriptions, as well as the distribution of instances across these subscriptions and regions, including in-service and stand-by details. This dashboard also provides performance metrics based on utilization. The AWS Auto Scaling Group (ASG) dashboards allow you to visualize usage and identify any performance issues related to utilization metrics such as CPU, Disk I/O, and Network Transmissions. This information helps you determine if adjustments to the ASG parameters are necessary.

For more information refer to the ASG: Service Overview

The following image shows the ASG: Service Overview dashboard

Figure 1: AWS ASG: Overview Dashboard

Simple Storage Service (S3): Service Overview

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a highly scalable, durable, and secure object storage service offered by AWS. The S3: Service Overview dashboard gives a comprehensive view to monitor and manage the S3 resources effectively

The S3: Service Overview dashboard serves as a centralized hub for managing AWS S3 services. It enables you to monitor the usage and performance of S3 buckets across various regions and subscriptions. The dashboard offers insights into bucket activity, including storage, requests received, request latency, error counts, and data transfer for specific operations. Additionally, it provides detailed bucket lists with information on the region, account, owner, storage class etc.

Refer to S3: Service Overview dashboard for more information

The below image illustrates the S3: Service Overview dashboard:

Figure 2: AWS S3: Overview Dashboard

 New Azure dashboards

Enhancing your ability to monitor Azure services effectively new the out-of-the-box Service Overview dashboard for monitoring Azure services: Virtual Machine, SQL Database & Azure SQL managed instances are available. The dashboard provides comprehensive insights into:

• Inventory –Databases (Allocated/Used), Subscriptions, Resource groups, Locations, Trend based on the current usage
• Availability
• Performance – CPU utilization, Data space Used, Data IO, Transaction log IO and Availability sessions

SQL Database Service Overview

The Hyperscale Observability enables to monitor your Azure SQL database resources on the SQL Database: Service Overview dashboard.

Monitoring your Azure SQL database resources is now easier. To monitor your Azure SQL database resources more efficiently, you can use the SQL Database: Service Overview dashboard directly. This allows you to bypass the drill-down steps from the Azure Service Summary dashboard to the SQL Database Service Details dashboard. Previously, you had to drill down to the SQL Database Service Details dashboard from the Azure Service Summary dashboard. Now you can bypass these drill-down steps, use the SQL Database: Service Overview dashboard directly.

The SQL Database Service Overview dashboard provides a single pane view of the SQL database infrastructure. This helps the DBAs to view the performance of the SQL databases on Microsoft Azure and take necessary action to improve the performance of the databases. This dashboard provides information on the storage based on used and allocated storage, distribution of the databased across subscription, resource groups and locations and service tiers. Additionally, the dashboard provides a trend displaying the latest change occurred.

This dashboard also provides the performance metrics for connection details like the failed and successful connections, TempDB metrics, system related metrics. This also lists the databases with details like the location, storage allocation, CPU utilization etc.

See SQL Database : Service Overview for accessing the dashboard.

 Figure 3: Azure SQL Database: Service Overview Dashboard

SQL Managed Instance Service Overview

The SQL MANAGED INSTANCE: SERVICE OVERVIEW dashboard gives you an overview of your Azure SQL managed instances.

You will be able to get a detailed comprehensive information about the inventory, performance metrics of the SQL managed instances and the instances list

Refer to SQL Managed Instances : Service Overview for details on accessing the dashboard

Figure 4: Azure SQL Managed Instance: Service Overview Dashboard

Virtual Machines Service Overview

 The Virtual Machine service dashboard provides a comprehensive view of the performance, availability and utilization of virtual machines that you manage. Some of the key information you can get immediately from the dashboard are:

Inventory

• Summary of VMs like the total, active, inactive and terminated VMs
• Resources based on subscriptions, groups and locations
• Trend: summary of the most recent changes in resource groups, subscriptions, and instance locations.
• Overview of disk storage across the storage tiers

Monitoring Performance to help you understand the VM resource utilization by displaying the metrics related to CPU, memory, disk, network usage.

See the Virtual Machine: Service Dashboard for details

 Figure 5: Azure Virtual Machine: Service Overview Dashboard

Kubernetes Dashboards

To provide in-depth insights to the Kubernetes monitoring, detailed drilldown reports for the Persistent Volume (PV) and Persistent Volume Claim (PVC) are now available.

The Kubernetes Resource Summary provides the overall status of the monitored Kubernetes environment. There are multiple detailed drilldown reports like Kubernetes Cluster instance Overview with detailed reports for namespaces, nodes etc are already available. Now, with this release, you will be able to monitor the Persistent volume details too.

From the Kubernetes Resource Summary, you will be able to access the Kubernetes Persistent Volume List, Kubernetes Persistent Volume Claim List, Persistent Volume Claims.

These dashboards provide a detailed insights into the storage resources of the cluster like the Storage Utilization, capacity, allocation, status, health, reclaim policy & performance.

For details see the documentation for Kubernetes Persistent Volume List,  Kubernetes Persistent Volume Claims details

OpenText AI Operations Management Reporting

Enhanced synthetic monitoring report

Synthetic Transaction Reports provide insights into the availability, and performance of applications and transactions. They use Business Process Monitor (BPM) to collect synthetic transaction metrics. After your application is deployed with OPTIC Reporting and configuring the reports, the metrics are stored in the OPTIC Data Lake. The reports are generated from the aggregated data from the OPTIC Data Lake. This helps in proactively identifying and resolving issues to ensure a smooth user experience.

The Synthetic Executive Summary report displays a single pane view of the applications, the details of the synthetic transaction, performance of the application, business transaction flows, location, and transactions summary.

The report provides insights needed to ensure applications run smoothly, maintain high availability by providing details of the inventory listing the number of applications, locations, transactions and Web traces. The application summary section provides the details of the Top N applications availability %, performance % and error count. This page also provides the overtime report for the availability and performance of the top N applications

A sample report looks like this:

Figure 6: Synthetic Monitoring: Executive Summary

The drill down from the application summary section for the selected application displays the Transaction Summary Report. This report displays the list of transactions in the application, the overtime report of the availability and performance of the selected transaction, the error count and the location distribution.  

Figure 7: Synthetic Monitoring: Transaction Summary Report

The Synthetic Location Summary report displays the selected location performance of the application monitored by BPM. You must click on the Location Summary row to view the data on the widgets.

 Figure 8: Synthetic Monitoring: Location Summary Report

Synthetic Layer Isolation Report

The application service owners will now be able to

• to isolate the area of application with performance issues
• look for the layers where processing time is spent

The Synthetic Layer Isolation report shows the response times for different transaction layers of selected transactions. The report includes data for the following layers:

client time, connection time, DNS time, download time, network time, response time, retry time, SSL handshake, time to first buffer

The sample report

Figure 9: Synthetic Monitoring: Layer Isolation Report

WebSphere Executive Summary Report

Operations Center Managers and Application Administrators now have the OBR equivalence report available for WebSphere Application.

This OOTB report provides a single pane view of the application servers' health, availability, and metric data from WebSphere and consolidated in the OPTIC Data Lake.

The OBM Management Pack for IBM WebSphere (MP for IBM WebSphere) is configured with the Operations Bridge Manager (OBM). This monitors the IBM WebSphere application servers and the underlying infrastructure operating in your environment.

A WebSphere summary report is used to provide an overview of the performance and status of WebSphere application servers within an enterprise. These reports are essential for administrators to monitor, manage, and optimize the performance of WebSphere Application Server, ensuring smooth and efficient operation of enterprise applications.

From the executive summary, you can view these details of metrics on the following reports:

• WebSphere Executive Summary
• WebSphere Availability Detail
• WebSphere JVM Details
• WebSphere JDBC Details
• WebSphere Thread Pool Details
• WebSphere Servlet Performance Details
• WebSphere EJB Performance Details

Refer to the WebSphere Executive Summary Flex report for details and limitations.

Figure 10: WebSphere Executive Summary report

Figure 11: WebSphere Executive Summary- Drilldown to ThreadPool details

Active Directory Executive Summary Report

Operations Center Managers and AD Administrators now have OBR equivalence report for Microsoft Active Directory.

The out-of-the-box (OOTB) flex reports, based on the OPTIC One UI framework, provide insights into Domain Controllers, Global Catalog (GC), and FSMO roles, utilizing data from the Active Directory Management Pack (MP) stored in the OPTIC Data Lake.

The OBM Management Pack for Microsoft Active Directory (MP for Microsoft Active Directory) works with the Operations Bridge Manager (OBM) enables you to monitor Active Directory servers and the underlying infrastructure operating in your environment. 

This monitoring summary report provides an overview of health and performance of your AD environment.

After you configure the application and the Management pack, the application metrics flow into OPTIC Data Lake. You can view these metrics on the following reports:

• Microsoft Active Directory Executive Summary
• Active Directory Detail
• Domain Controller Detail

Refer to the Microsoft Active Directory Executive Summary Flex report for access and details

Figure 12: Microsoft Active Directory Executive Summary report

Figure 13: Microsoft Active Directory Executive Summary report – Drilldown to Active Directory Detail report

Automatic Event Correlation (AEC)

This release has significant enhancements to the Automatic Event Correlation (AEC) Tuning UI, designed to streamline your event management processes and improve efficiency.

Event Partitioning by CI Collections created by Hyperscale Observability: The Partition Strategy drop-down now includes a new option: Topology and HSO. This allows you to incorporate CI collections created by Hyperscale Observability when setting up event partitions, ensuring more precise and relevant event grouping.

AEC Event Tags Widget: Our new AEC Event Tags widget enables you to configure custom attributes or Hyperscale Observability cloud tag keys for partitioning. This flexibility allows for more tailored and effective event management.

Maximum Correlation Age Setting: To enhance the relevance of your event data, a maximum correlation age setting is introduced. This feature prevents the sending of correlation events older than a specified duration to OBM, particularly useful during incidents like upgrades or outages.  The default maximum correlation age is set to 90 minutes, ensuring that only the most current and pertinent events are considered.

For details on AEC tuning UI, see AEC Tuning UI

OBM

All new features of OBM classic are also available for containerized OBM. For details please see What’s New in OpenText AI Operations Management CE 24.4 (Classic Edition).

Additionally, containerized OBM offers:

Migrate classic OBM to containerized OBM

There is a comprehensive and verified process for transitioning your current OBM setup to containers while using your existing databases. By leveraging the existing IDM and UCMDB databases, you can streamline the migration process and minimize disruptions to your day-to-day operations. For more information, see the Migrate classic OBM to Containerized OBM page.

Automated downtime data forwarding to OPTIC DL

In a containerized OBM environment with OPTIC Data Lake, the system automatically enables downtime forwarding to OPTIC DL, ensuring accurate downtime representation in the reports. For more information, see Downtime forwarding from containerized OBM to OPTIC DL.

These enhancements are designed to provide you greater insights into your operations and efficient user experience. We are excited to see how these new features will benefit your operations and help you achieve your goals.

More Operations Bridge 24.4 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 below.

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 24.4 Release Readiness Webinar
• On-demand: Operations Bridge Refresh 2023

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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