The latest release of OpenText Operations Bridge, our AIOps platform, 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 talks about the new release of Operations Bridge – SaaS. This article is the fourth 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. The new features that are part of Containerized Operations Bridge are described in the blog articles What’s New in Operations Bridge Reporting, Application Monitoring and Agentless Monitoring and Hyperscale Observability: What’s New in Operations Bridge 2023.05.

Summary of changes

Unified Cloud Observability and SiteScope

• Enables monitoring of 500-2000 cloud and/or on-premises instances

Multivariate Anomaly Detection (MVAD)

• Available for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure cloud metrics for 50+ Configuration Items (CI) types
• The anomalies are detected and displayed as events in the Event Browser
• A separate Anomaly Details UI shows detailed information about each detected anomaly

SaaS without an on-premises OBM

• Monitoring configuration and executing of actions and tools on Operations Agents directly from SaaS OBM
• Event Processing Interface (EPI) script execution and administration in SaaS

Kubernetes infrastructure monitoring

• Discovery and monitoring of your Kubernetes infrastructure objects

Grafana support

• Connect the OPTIC Data Lake (DL) to your on-premises Grafana through the new OPTIC DL data source plugin

For more details, please see the Operations Bridge – SaaS 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 Operations Bridge SaaS

As already mentioned above, our latest Operations Bridge release brings significant improvements and simplifications for our SaaS customers. The overview of the current SaaS setup is graphically presented in the following diagram:

Figure 1. Operations Bridge 2023.05 SaaS deployment

The new features for Operations Bridge SaaS are covered in more detail in the remainder of this blog post.

Unified Cloud Observability and SiteScope

In this release, we have expanded our SaaS Cloud Observability workflows by including agentless monitoring and incident creation for web applications and infrastructure. We now provide a unified view for Cloud Observability and the SiteScope reporting thus combining the simple deployment of lightweight agentless monitoring with powerful reporting and analytics features of the OPTIC DL. The benefits that you gain are summarized in the below list:

• Detection of cloud resources including web applications and the on-premises infrastructure
• Application and service status view grouping of important targets (both cloud and off-cloud)
• Out-of-the-box guided workflows to accelerate troubleshooting
• Fast root cause analysis via Flex Dashboards and reports with SQL-free data exploration
• Multivariate anomaly detection on the cloud data as an optional add-on (explained later in this article)

In this release, we enable you to monitor 500-2000 cloud and/or on-premises instances (SiteScope must be previously installed and the Operations Bridge SaaS with SiteScope integration successfully configured). You can use the Hyperscale Observability capability in Operations Bridge – SaaS to configure cloud (AWS and Azure) monitors and your on-premises SiteScope instance to configure monitoring for the on-premises infrastructure and applications. You can then see a combined view of your cloud and on-premises applications as illustrated below:

Figure 2. Application and service status view

We currently offer the following out-of-the-box guided workflows to help you troubleshoot your problems faster and more efficient:

• Monitoring of events displayed under SiteScope groups and AWS tag-based collections through a single watch list
• Cloud Subject Matter Expert workflows for AWS events

The following workflows are optional and require the SaaS Operations team to be configured:

• New Analytics add-on to include Multivariate Anomaly Detection (MVAD) events for AWS
• Integration with Service Management Automation X (SMAX) to create tickets on SiteScope and cloud events

To summarize, you can use Cloud Observability to:

• Configure monitoring for cloud environments
• Discover cloud topology and collect cloud metrics
• Generate events based on thresholds

Using SiteScope, you can do the following:

• Essential infrastructure monitoring
• Essential infrastructure metrics stored in the OPTIC DL
• Configure application monitors (including URL monitors) and infrastructure monitors
• Structure monitoring to reflect the services or application hierarchy
• Integrate metrics, topology and events into Operations Bridge SaaS

Note: In SiteScope, you need to arrange groups to reflect services or application hierarchy as shown in the screenshot below.

Figure 3. Arranging groups in SiteScope

For information on other prerequisites and the required tasks to configure monitoring for your Cloud environment, see Cloud and on-premises monitoring with OpScope.

Multivariate Anomaly Detection

Multivariate Anomaly Detection (MVAD) is a new functionality that allows you to determine anomalies by analyzing more than one metric simultaneously based on Machine Learning mechanisms. It identifies anomalies in complex IT data, which can lead to new insights and opportunities for further analysis.

Currently, MVAD is available on SaaS and is available for AWS and Azure cloud metrics for over 50 CI types.

MVAD automatically generates anomaly events, which are displayed in the Event Browser. For each anomaly event, you can launch a more detailed Anomaly Details UI, which shows the metrics that contributed to the anomaly (also, which metrics contributed most), the affected CIs and the events of these CIs. You can launch a drilldown into metric details to see each metric in a separate graph.

Figure 4. The Multivariate Anomaly Details UI

MVAD works out of the box for all CIs of the supported CI types. It uses the default anomaly detection sensitivity (7) and sends anomaly events as soon as the anomalies are detected. You can also adjust these settings for a CI type or even for individual CIs if needed. The Anomaly Detection - Multivariate UI provides you with the following four tabs where you can finetune the default MVAD options:

• MVAD Configuration Settings allows you to set the event mode and the MVAD global sensitivity:
  • The event mode setting controls whether the MVAD events are active and visible in the OBM Event Browser (the Open mode) or they are sent in a closed state and are not visible to the end user (the Log only mode).
  • The MVAD global sensitivity setting allows you to change the default sensitivity for detecting anomalies, in the range between 0 – 10 (the higher the number, the more anomalies deviating from the expected behavior are generated).
  • The MVAD global event schedule setting controls the default event schedule, which determines when and under which conditions the anomaly events are triggered. These conditions include the minimum anomaly rank to send events for, the duration of an anomaly before sending an event and the time between events
    (additional events will not be sent before the end of the specified timeout period)
• CI Types Settings enables you to configure anomaly detection settings for the selected CI types
• CI Settings allows you to add available CIs for a target type, enable or disable anomaly detection for CIs and monitor the readiness of added CIs
• Event Schedule Settings allows you to create an event schedule or edit existing event schedules. You can set or modify periods of time when MVAD will report events. 

Figure 5. Finetuning MVAD options: The CI Types Settings tab

MVAD options and the related procedures are described in detail in Administer Multivariate Anomaly Detection.

OBM SaaS deployments without an on-premises OBM

In this release, policy management of Operations Agents has been moved to in-cloud SaaS components removing the need for OBM on-premises in many cases. This saves you time and complexity since you need to manage fewer components.

Thus, in SaaS deployments, you now can:

• Perform Monitoring Automation policy management
• Execute actions and tools
• Administer EPI scripts
• Create and maintain user roles. For more information, see Configure Users, Groups, and Roles.

To forward action and tool execution to the Operations Agent from OBM SaaS, you need to configure an Operations Agent proxy on the Monitoring Service Edge server. You can use the Autogrant Token UI to onboard the Operations Agent. For more information, see Configure agent proxy on Monitoring Service Edge.

Good to know:

• Administration tasks for which you still need to involve the SaaS Operations team include:
  • Changing Time-Based Event Automation (TBEA)/event forwarding scripts/groovy scripts (any scripting that is not EPI scripting). Note: EPI scripts can be editing directly in SaaS.
  • Changing infrastructure settings
  • Importing content packs
• Operations Agent patching cannot be triggered from the OBM SaaS UI (please, use external tools for that)
• SaaS users cannot yet access the Operations Agent Health view
• You cannot use Performance Dashboard (PD) graphs that retrieve the metric data from the Operations Agent data source. You need to use Flex Dashboards and PD graphs that retrieve the data from OPTIC DL instead.

Kubernetes infrastructure monitoring

Operations Bridge SaaS now supports the discovery and monitoring of Kubernetes infrastructure objects. You can visualize Kubernetes infrastructure metrics using the OBM Performance Dashboard, Performance Troubleshooter dashboards or Flex dashboards in OPTIC One. Hyperscale Observability offers out-of-the-box thresholds for all supported Kubernetes infrastructure objects (listed in Supported Kubernetes objects). For other details, see Administer Hyperscale Observability for Kubernetes, Use Hyperscale Observability for Kubernetes and Hyperscale Observability for Kubernetes.

Monitoring Service Edge has been enhanced to support Kubernetes collector. You can deploy Kubernetes collector on Monitoring Service Edge to monitor your on-premises Kubernetes infrastructure. For more information, see Integrate OpsB-SaaS with Monitoring Service Edge.

Grafana support in SaaS

In this release, we have added Grafana to the list of business intelligence (BI) tools that we support, in addition to Power BI, Tableau and Qlik Sense.

The new OPTIC DL data source plugin (downloadable here) allows you to configure and connect the OPTIC DL to your on-premises Grafana. The data is collected using the authenticated and secured connection from Grafana to application deployment with the OPTIC DL.

The plugin supports Grafana 8.5.x and 9.x versions. The instructions on how to install the plugin are provided in the Grafana documentation. Note that you need to contact the SaaS Operations team to enable access and provide read-only user credentials.

You can deploy the plugin on any system with Grafana and configure the OPTIC DL data source using the Grafana console. Once configured, you can enter a SELECT query and view your OPTIC DL data in Grafana. For more information, see View SaaS data on Grafana.

More Operations Bridge 2023.05 release-related details are provided in the Operations Bridge Release Readiness Webinar slides and recording.

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 Summer Series: AI and More
• 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

Have technical questions about Operations Bridge? Visit the OpsBridge User Discussion Forum. 

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Do you have an idea or Product Enhancement Request about Operations Bridge? Submit it in the Ops Bridge Idea Exchange.