We are pleased to announce the availability of OpenText Operations Bridge 23.4, our AIOps platform. This release introduces the new versions of the Operations Bridge Classic, Container and SaaS deployments, with various new features, integrations and usability improvements. This blog post focuses on the new releases of Operations Bridge Manager (OBM), SiteScope, Operations Agent (OA) and the Operations Bridge content. This is the first article in a series of blog posts about the new Operations Bridge release. Stay tuned for the next article to learn about OpenText OpScope!

Summary of changes

Operations Bridge Manager 23.4

In this release, we introduced numerous new features and enhancements, with a focus on usability, automation and simplification, such as:

• Improved monitoring of the SiteScope and OA health ​
• Simplified administration with the new Instrumentation User Interface (UI)​
• The integration of the OBM Event Browser in the Service Management Automation X (SMAX) UI
• OBM UIs can now be integrated into the OPTIC One UI
• The New Group by Agent Configuration Item (CI) Status widget in the Monitored Nodes Dashboard
• On-demand loading of assignments
• Favorite actions are now available in Event Details and in the Context menu
• Focused visualization of the CI subtree in the OBM Health Top View
• OBM CLI enhancements
• Miscellaneous OBM enhancements:
  • Parameterized graphs in the OBM Performance Dashboard show graphs for all instances automatically
  • Fine-granular permissions for the Certificate Requests UI
  • The JMS bus activate state update interval is now configurable to prevent unwanted failovers of the bus
  • Nested aspects can now include the same policy
  • The Status Web Service Interface allows filtering for some status values and grouping of the results
  • The Downtime REST API now supports CI name as a selector
  • The automatic cleanup of the internal CI mapping table is configurable via Infrastructure Settings
  • Audit logs have information about the user's organization (IDM only)
• Documented OBM internal events
• The location of some log files has changed in this release. See the updated documentation for information on how to access them.

Note: The new capabilities are available for both Classic and Containerized OBM 23.4.

SiteScope 23.4

• Support for Solution Template for Oracle 19c database
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.x certification
• A configurable option to send average CPU or "per CPU" metrics from SiteScope to the OPTIC Data Lake (DL)
• Initial history data ingestion into the OPTIC DL
• Support for enhanced Custom Mapping Attributes (CMA)
• Propagate SiteScope tag data to Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB) for OpScope
• Enhanced Sizing Calculator

Operations Agent (OA) 12.25

• Agent health improvements
• Secure Hash Algorithm 2 (SHA-2) authentication in Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) v3 processing ​
• OA now sends the ucmdb ID in the Agent Side System Detection (ASSD) info
• Ability to filter IP addresses and publish via ASSD
• The new opcparam CLI utility is now available on Solaris Sparc

Operations Bridge content

• OBM Management Pack for Infrastructure 23.4:
  • You can now specify utilization thresholds for different disk size ranges
• OBM Management Pack for IBM WebSphere Application Server 23.4 – collection of additional metrics:
  • Specific Application Thread Pool Utilization metrics
  • Enhanced JDBC Connection Pool Utilization metrics
• Operations Connector for OneView 23.4:
  • Simplified upgrade process
  • Metric integration into OA and OPTIC Data Lake
• Operations Connector for Microsoft SCOM: No changes in the connector itself, but Operations Bridge 23.4 ships a SCOM Executive Summary report for the SCOM data integrated into OPTIC DL.

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

Details on the new OBM features

Improved monitoring of SiteScope and Operations Agent health

In this release, we offer you a new out-of-the-box workspace that provides insights into Operations Agent and SiteScope health, helping you identify and troubleshoot potential health issues of your monitoring components.

The new Monitoring Health tab in the Workspaces > Operations Console UI contains the following UI components:

• Monitoring Health that includes a general event overview of your SiteScopes and Operations Agents (color coding: green – OK, blue – warning, yellow – major, red – critical). Configuration, Runtime and Monitoring categories provide you with the quick information which area is causing a problem. Clicking one of these categories displays related events in the Event Browser section.
• Watch List that offers you an at-a-glance health status of your monitoring components.
• Event Browser that shows the events of your monitoring components, with the possibility to drill down into the event details.
• Performance Dashboards that provide graphical visualization of the key performance metrics and help you identify potential performance bottlenecks:
  • Operations Agent Health Dashboard shows the overall system health status and informs you about the CPU and memory utilization of your Operations Agent and the corresponding node
  • SiteScope Health Dashboard displays various metrics, such as system CPU, memory and SiteScope monitors
    A corresponding Performance Dashboard is shown when you select a CI in the Watch List or an event in the Event Browser.

Figure 1. Insights into the Operations Agent health

This workspace page can also be offered to non-admin users, so that they can get insights whether the underlying monitoring infrastructure is working properly.

Note that in order to get the data for the SiteScope widget and the full value of the Performance Dashboard, in SiteScope, you need to enable Monitoring Automation Health and SiteScope Health. For more information, see Monitoring Automation Health and Health of SiteScope Server Monitor.

For more details on this feature and the descriptions of UI components, see Monitoring Health.

Monitoring Automation: The new Instrumentation UI

In this release, we simplified administration by providing you with the new Instrumentation UI (Administration > Monitoring > Instrumentation), allowing you to manage instrumentation directly from the OBM UI.

Note: Instrumentation are the scripts and executables that can be run by the Operations Agent as defined in the monitoring policies.

You can now perform the following administrative tasks directly from the UI:

• Create, update and delete instrumentation packages​
• Create patches and hotfixes​
• Download instrumentation packages and instrumentation template​
• List installed instrumentation packages​
• Browse the instrumentation package content​

Figure 2. Creating instrumentation from the UI

For further details on this feature, see Instrumentation user interface.

OBM and SMAX integration

With the new Service Management Automation X (SMAX) and OBM integration, SMAX incident analysts working in SMAX can see all events related to underlying topology of a business service in the context of an incident.

This gives them real-time access to the OBM data and allows gathering additional information to troubleshoot an incident. The information that is shown in the context of an incident includes all events for a problematic service tree. With this, SMAX incident analysts will be able to determine possible root causes of an incident and take a necessary action faster than before.

Figure 3. The CI topology of service and the related OBM events in the SMAX UI

Note that prior to using this integration, you need to perform several configuration steps described in Integrate with Operations Bridge Manager for events viewing. This topic also provides you with the integration overview and gives you an insight into the integration architecture.

OBM UIs can be integrated into the OPTIC One UI

Several Operations Bridge capabilities, such as Agentless and Application Monitoring, Operations Bridge Reporting and Hyperscale Observability, already use OPTIC One UI, our unified UI for multiple OPTIC applications. The complete OBM UI can now be integrated into the OPTIC One as well, enabling you to run all your workflows from a single UI.

 All OBM UIs – administration and operational – are automatically available in OPTIC One, provided the OBM capability is selected when you deploy Containerized Operations Bridge.

Note: This functionality is also available for OBM Classic; in this case, OBM must be registered in OPTIC One, see Integrate OPTIC One with remote OBM.

Figure 4. The OBM UI in the OPTIC One UI

The new Group by Agent CI Status widget

The Monitored Nodes UI dashboard now contains a new out-of-the-box widget showing you the combined health status of all Operations Agents in your environment. The new Agent Health section in Node Details gives you an insight into the health status of the Agent on a selected node.

Figure 5. Group by Agent CI Status widget in the Monitored Nodes UI

See Monitored Nodes for more information. 

Quicker access to the assignments of a CI

In past releases, in the Assignments & Tuning UI (Administration > Monitoring), the assignments were loaded automatically for all CIs once you selected a view. This caused long loading times if there were many assignments for this view. And even if you were only interested in the assignments for one particular CI, you would still need to wait until all assignments are loaded.

Now the assignments for a selected view are only loaded on demand if you explicitly click the View icon with the Load view level assignments tooltip. If you do not do this, the Assignments UI section remains empty on a view selection.

You can view the assignments of a specific CI if you explicitly select it from the list of available CIs in the View Explorer. In this case, the assignments will load automatically, without you needing to click the View icon first.

For more information, see Assignments and Tuning.

Favorite actions in Event Details and in the Context menu

In the previous OBM release, we have already provided you with an option to pin your favorite action items, such as actions, runbooks or tools, to the Launch component of the Event Browser. Now, Favorite actions are also displayed on a top level in the Context menu of the events and in the Event Details pane (under Launch - Favorites). This allows you to quickly find and launch your frequently used actions. Note that if you add or remove the pin for an action item in one place, for example, in Event Details, the change will be reflected at the other two locations as well.

Favorite actions are user-specific meaning that only you will be able to see them as favorites. For more information, see Use the Launch Pane.

Health top view: Focused visualization of the CI subtree

Earlier, the OBM Health Top View widget could appear too “busy” for big views, and the focus on a selected CI was lost because subtrees for siblings were also displayed.

Figure 6. Containing CI

Now, we added a new Path to root and subtree of selected CI mode for the Health Top View component allowing you to only view the subtree of a selected CI, its children and its path to the root. You can switch between this new mode and the old mode (Path to root and subtree of all CIs in the path) using the component options.

Figure 7. Path to root and subtree

The new mode is selected by default, but this default can be overwritten using the new Default Health Top View Mode infrastructure setting.

For more information, see Health Top View Component.

Miscellaneous OBM enhancements

• OBM Performance Dashboard: Parameterized graphs now show graphs for all instances automatically.
• Fine-granular permissions for the Certificate Requests UI: Instead of granting permissions to the whole Certificate Requests UI, it is now possible to grant permissions to specific parts of the UI individually.

Figure 8. Fine-granular permissions in the Certificate Requests UI

• High-availability deployment enhancement: The JMS bus activate state update interval is now configurable via the JMS update interval infrastructure setting to prevent unwanted failovers of the bus. This will delay failovers in case of a real outage and should therefore only be used by customers who experience unwanted failovers. For details, see Infrastructure Settings Used in Event Processing.
• OBM CLI enhancements:
  • The opr-event-forwarder CLI has been enhanced with the new options for improved troubleshooting: -ca, -cancel_all to cancel all forwarding requests and -lpr, -list_pending_request to list all pending forwarding requests.
  • The new -modify_node option for the opr-node CLI now allows mass operations to be performed to add or remove nodes from node groups.
  • The opr-jmxClient CLI has been enhanced with the new options to show available MBeans and methods.
• Monitoring Automation enhancement: Nested aspects can now include the same policy, which allows to add policies to an aspect that are already part of a child aspect. For you, this means lower maintenance effort and more flexibility, as this enhancement enables the re-use and combination of existing aspects.
• The Status Web Service Interface now supports filtering for certain status values and grouping of the results, including retrieving summary count only. Grouping is possible based on the CI type and status. For details, see Status Web Service Interface.
• The Downtime REST API now allows you to use CI name as an alternative to CI ID as a CI selector.
• Automatic cleanup of the internal CI mapping table, which improved the performance when processing discovery data. By default, it runs automatically every 24 hours. If desired, you can adjust the default value via the infrastructure setting Time interval to clean up stale entries from discovery mapping table.
• Audit logs now have information about the user's organization (IDM only). For more information, see Monitoring Automation Audit logging.
• The list of OBM internal events is now available in the documentation. Internal events are categorized into internal events created by code and by policies. For more information, see Internal events.

Details on the new SiteScope features

• Support for Solution Template for Oracle 19c. Oracle Database solution templates can be used to deploy a set of monitors that test the health, availability and performance of an Oracle database. This solution template can now be used for Oracle 19c databases as well. The deployed monitors check general system statistics, such as cache hit ratios and disk I/O, and include tools that provide diagnostic information about important aspects of the database. For more information, see Oracle Database Solution Template.
• In this release, we offer a configurable option to send average CPU or "per CPU" metrics from the SiteScope Server to the OPTIC DL.
• SiteScope now supports up to 50 Custom Message Attributes (CMAs) when sending events to OBM. You can also customize CMA names.
• SiteScope now supports the SiteScope tag propagation to UCMDB. You can create tags and associate them at Monitor, Group, and Measurement Group level. (In OpScope, tags are used to link SiteScope monitors to Applications.)
• Initial history data ingestion to the OPTIC DL: SiteScope supports five days of history data to be sent to Optic Data Lake for the porting purpose.
• The SiteScope Sizing Calculator now allows you to specify which integrations will be used, since this has an impact on the sizing of the SiteScope server.
• The SiteScope Server now supports RHEL 9.x (Install and Monitoring). See Server system requirements for Windows and Server System Requirements for Linux.

For a complete list of SiteScope enhancements implemented in this release, see the SiteScope Release notes.

Details on the new Operations Agent features

• Enhanced Agent Health monitoring for the opcmona subagent with the following improvements:
  • The internal events are consolidated, meaningful, actionable, state-aware and lifecycle-managed
  • Reduction in internal events
  • A better drilldown for the root cause analysis
    For more information, see Agent Health Status.

• Publish of ud_unique_id via ASSD now eliminates CI reconciliation issues when both the UD Agent and Operations Agent are installed.
  Duplicate CIs and CI reconciliation issues are resolved as the Operations Agent now detects and publishes the unique identifier defined by the UD Agent when it reports its Agent Side System Detection/Discovery (ASSD) data. For details, see How the ASSD information of the ud_unique_id is created on OA.
• SHA-2 authentication support for the SNMP v3 processing. (SNMP v3 enables secure authentication and communication between the SNMP manager and agent.) Operations Agent now supports SHA-2 as an authentication protocol in trap interceptor policies and external source policies for monitoring subagent. For more information, see Configuring the SNMP Trap Interceptor for SNMPv3 Traps.
• Ability to filter IP addresses and publish via ASSD. It is now possible to filter IP addresses that are published by the Operations Agent via ASSD by using the configuration variable OPC_ASSD_FILTER_IP. For more information, see ENABLE_PINGSERVER_COREID_CHECK in Configuration Variables for the Communication Component.
• In Solaris Sparc, the new opcparam CLI utility is now available that can read the parameters from a policy template (usage: opcparam <policy name> <policy type>).

For a complete list of Operations Agent enhancements implemented in this release, see the Operations Agent Release notes.

Changes in the Operations Bridge content

The section below describes the most prominent changes in the Operations Bridge content. For a list of all implemented enhancements, please see the Release notes for individual Management Packs and Operations Connectors.

OBM Management Pack for Infrastructure 23.4 (and 2023.05 P1):

Specify utilization thresholds for different disk size ranges. You can now specify utilization thresholds for different disk size ranges, which allows you to define different thresholds for example for larger disks than for smaller disks. For more information, see Management Pack for Infrastructure Release notes.

OBM Management Pack for IBM WebSphere Application Server 23.4:

• Specific Application Thread Pool Utilization metrics
• Enhanced JDBC Connection Pool Utilization metric

For more information, see Management Pack for IBM Websphere Application Server Release Notes.

Operations Connector for OneView 23.4:

• Operations Connector is no longer required to deploy the OneView Connector – deployment can be done to an Operations Agent system from OBM. For more information, see Deployment scenarios.
• Metric integration into OA and OPTIC DL.
  The OneView Connector now retrieves metrics from OneView and stores them into the Operations Agent data store. It can also integrate the metrics into OPTIC DL.
  The collected metrics include power consumption metrics, which can be used to create carbon footprint dashboards and reports. For information about which metrics are collected, see Metric Integration.

For a complete list of new features and enhancements, see Connector for OneView Release notes.

More Operations Bridge 23.4 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 23.4 Release Readiness Webinar

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