Recently we released OpenText Operations Bridge CE 24.2, a new version of our AIOps platform.

This blog focuses on what’s new in Containerized Operations Bridge CE 24.2 (Note: many of the features are also available to Operations Bridge SaaS customers). For details about what’s new in classic products, please see What’s New in Operations Bridge CE 24.2 (Classic Edition).

All Operations Bridge deployments, regardless of whether you use the classic products, containerized Operations Bridge or SaaS, can now benefit from our new IT Operations Aviator, which is a secure, private generative AI (GenAI) virtual agent that leverages domain-specific enterprise knowledge to simplify work for everyone. Aviator empowers users to self-resolve common requests by providing relevant, contextual responses in natural language. 

Apart from that, the new Containerized Operations Bridge Manager release provides enhancements in many capabilities: 

Summary of changes

The new IT Operations Aviator

• gives instructions on how to remediate OBM events
• powered by a private Large Language Model (LLM)

Containerized Operations Bridge

Containerized OBM

• Offers the same features as OBM classic 24.2 – see What’s New in Operations Bridge CE 24.2 (Classic Edition)

Agentless Monitoring

• Manage Syslog monitor, Health monitor & Health Group
• Global Search and Replace (GSAR) enhancement
• Reduced mandatory upgrades by offering backward compatibility to SiteScope version n-1

Application Monitoring

• Downtime Management

AEC

• AEC Tuning UI and Preview mode

HSO

• Easier threshold management using Threshold Management UI
• Application Monitoring using Prometheus collector
• Support for AppEngine and Cloud SQL services in GCP collector
• Azure Virtual Machine and Application Gateway dashboards allow display of metrics that have a certain property value (property filter)
• VMware Treemap dashboard showing resources organized in a hierarchical structure
• VmWare Latency dashboards 

OPTIC One

• Content Manager CLI to manage OPTIC One content
• New data visualization options: tree map, sunburst, geomap (bubble map)
• Loading of unfiltered data can be prevented using required parameters
• New widget notifications
• Use your own custom logo for PDF export
• In time series charts, data is automatically sorted by timestamp
• In table widgets, data is loaded in chunks, while scrolling through table
• Sort the category bar by value
• Dark theme

OPTIC Reporting

• Simplified reconfiguration of classic OBM
• Faster AMC history collection
• Monitor AMC history collection status
• New Flex reports
• Localized reports
• Extension of Schema (customer requests)

Install & Upgrade

• Automatic synchronization of parameters between values.yaml and AppHub
• Migrate a low footprint deployment to a regular deployment

Details on the new capabilities

IT Operations Aviator with AI Operations

In this release, IT Operations Aviator with AI Operations (Aviator) is available as Software as a Service (SaaS). 

Aviator is a conversational interface that integrates with your OBM environment deployed outside of SaaS and gives instructions on how to remediate OBM events. It is powered by a private Large Language Model (LLM), designed to minimize human intervention with the assistance based on the vendor documentation and your knowledge base. This virtual agent is equipped with some user context. It can engage end users in human-like conversations and give instructions on how to solve or troubleshoot the issues. For more information, see Get started with Aviator.

Figure 1: Aviator inside OBM

For more information about how to configure and enable Aviator, see Administer Aviator and Enable Aviator. For detailed instructions on using Aviator, see Use Aviator.

If you are interested in subscribing to Aviator, contact your OpenText sales representative.

What's new in Containerized Operations Bridge 24.2

Containerized Operations Bridge introduces the following new features:

IT Operations Aviator with AI Operations

The SaaS-based aviator service can be integrated into OBM of a containerized Operations Bridge and provide value to containerized Operations Bridge customers. See above for details.

Containerized OBM

The containerized OBM offers the same features as OBM classic 24.2 – see (+) What’s New in Operations Bridge CE 24.2 (Classic Edition) | OpenText Community for Micro Focus products.

Agentless Monitoring

This release introduces the following features in Agentless Monitoring:

Syslog monitor

You can now manage the Syslog monitor using Agentless Monitoring.  Syslog monitor automatically scans log files for error information from UNIX and Linux servers. Agentless monitoring automates this task for you at set intervals, rendering manual log scanning unnecessary. Additionally, you can receive notifications for warning conditions that may have otherwise gone unnoticed until more serious issues arise. For more information, see Syslog Monitor.

Health Monitor enhancements

From this release, managing Health monitors is fully available in Agentless monitoring and there is no need to switch to the SiteScope Local Client. Health monitors provide key indicators for monitoring application performance, including availability, license usage, server health, and logs of the SiteScope application. You can select the specific metrics you want to monitor using the monitor's settings. For more information, see Health Monitor.

Health Group enhancements

The Health Group is enhanced with options to enable and disable logging. In addition, if you delete any existing health monitors, you can use the 'Recreate missing health monitors' option within the Health Group. For more information, see Health Monitor.

Global Search and Replace (GSAR) on monitor groups

From this release, Global Search and Replace functionality lets you search for a specific term or pattern across multiple monitor groups simultaneously. It saves time and reduces errors by allowing administrators to make consistent changes across related monitor groups in environments with a large number of monitor groups or complex monitoring requirements.  For more information, see Global Search and Replace.

Reduced mandatory upgrades by offering backward compatibility to SiteScope version n-1

Agentless Monitoring now supports both the current and previous SiteScope versions. In this release, Agentless Monitoring is compatible with SiteScope versions 23.4 and 24.2. For SiteScope version 23.4, some restrictions apply. To achieve functional parity, you must install the hotfix on SiteScope 23.4. For more information, see Version compatibility in Agentless monitoring. 

Application Monitoring

This release introduces the following feature in Application Monitoring:

Downtime management

Downtime management enables you to exclude specific time periods from calculations for events, alerts, or views, ensuring accurate CI data representation. You can now manage downtime for BPM applications using Application Monitoring. For more information, see Manage downtime for BPM Applications.

Automatic Event Correlation

In this release, comprehensive support for the AEC Tuning UI and Preview mode has been incorporated. The two features were initially introduced in version 23.4 as a technology preview. 

• With the AEC tuning UI, you can optimize AEC for your specific data, resulting in better event reduction. AEC can create larger or smaller correlation events, or increase or decrease the number of correlation groups.
• In AEC Preview mode, you can view the tuned correlation events in the AEC Explained UI before sending them to the OBM Event Browser.

For more information, see AEC Tuning UI.

Hyperscale Observability

This release introduces the following features in Hyperscale Observability:

Easier threshold management using Threshold Management UI

You can now configure thresholds for AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes monitoring using OPTIC One. In the older versions, threshold configuration was only supported through CLI. For more information, see Manage thresholds for AWS using Cloud Monitoring UI, Manage custom thresholds for Azure using Cloud Monitoring UI, and Manage custom thresholds for Kubernetes using Cloud Monitoring UI.

Application Monitoring using Prometheus collector

Hyperscale Observability introduces a new collector that enables you to discover and monitor applications, running in a containerized or a non-containerized environment, through Prometheus. You can visualize the collected metrics in the Prometheus dashboards. You can configure thresholds to trigger events whenever an application metric breaches the threshold. Hyperscale Observability offers static out-of-the-box thresholds for all the supported applications. For the list of supported applications monitored by Prometheus collector, see Applications supported by Prometheus collector. For other details, see Administer Hyperscale Observability for Prometheus, and Use Hyperscale Observability for Prometheus.

Support for AppEngine and Cloud SQL services in GCP collector

The GCP collector now supports essential monitoring for AppEngine and Cloud SQL services. For more information, see GCP Essential monitoring.

Azure Virtual Machine and Application Gateway dashboards allow display of metrics that have a certain property value (property filter)

The property filter enables you to filter the metric data based on metric name, property name, and property value. Based on your selection, the graphs in the Metric Data pane are updated. This feature is supported for Virtual Machine and Application Gateway services. For more information, see View Azure dashboards.

VMware Treemap dashboard showing resources organized in a hierarchical structure

The VMware Treemap (Beta) dashboard gives high level summary and a comprehensive view of VMware resources. A treemap organizes the VMware resources in a hierarchical structure. The dashboard gives you a single view of data on CPU utilization and disk usage for vCenter, host, data center, cluster, and Virtual Machines (VM). For more information, see View VMware treemap dashboard.

Figure 2: VMWare treemap dashboard

VmWare Latency dashboards 

The Latency dashboard, an extension to the VMware dashboard, helps you to determine the performance of connected objects within VMware setup. You can observe the latency in data movement from parent to connected objects and can take course correction measures. For more information, see the Latency dashboards section in View VMware dashboards. 

Figure 3: VmWare Host Datastore latency dashboard

OPTIC One

This release introduces the following features in OPTIC One:

Content Manager CLI to manage OPTIC One content

You can upload and manage your own content pack by using the Content Manager (CM) Command Line Interface (CLI) tool. The Content Manager CLI facilitates creating, removing, and updating the content packs.  It also enables you to transfer content from one instance of your application to another through export features. For more information, see Manage OPTIC One content using CLI.

New data visualization options through three new widget types

The following widget types are introduced in this release:

• Tree map widget
• Sunburst chart
• Geomap

Figure 4: Treemap examples

Figure 5: Sunburst example showing languages that are spoken in different countries

Figure 6: Geomap example showing CO2 consumption per country  

Use your own custom logo for PDF export

You can now upload a custom logo image (format JPEG, JPG, PNG, and SVG) and export the page as a PDF with the logo. For more information, see Manage user and system settings.

Loading of unfiltered data can be prevented using required parameters

You can now set a context as a required parameter to display the data in the widgets. You can do this either by setting the [required] tag in the query or selecting the Required option in the Dimensions tab. For more information, see Data query.

New widget notifications

Widgets now show new notifications inside the widget if a parameter was not specified, or if no data could be returned by the SQL query etc.

In time series charts, data is automatically sorted by timestamp

You no longer need to sort the data inside the query as OPTIC One automatically adds ORDER BY to the query.

In table widgets, data is loaded in chunks, while scrolling through table

This avoids loading all the data and improves the performance when displaying dashboards with tables.

Sort the category bar by value

You can now sort the bars in the Category bar chart by values or by the legend set for the widget. For more information, see the Categorized bar chart section of Time series bar chart.

Dark theme

You can enable dark mode as the theme for OPTIC One. This has an effect on all UIs inside OPTIC One. Please note that some MVAD (SaaS only) and some Administrative UIs are not yet usable in dark mode.

For more information, see Manage user and system settings.

OPTIC Reporting

This release introduces the following features in OPTIC Reporting:

Simplified reconfiguration of classic OBM

If you want to use a different classic OBM with Containerized Operations Bridge, now you can easily reconfigure it using AppHub UI or by running the helm upgrade command. You no longer need to execute exhaustive steps to reconfigure OBM, as required in the older versions.

Faster AMC history collection

In the older versions, allotted resources like CPU and memory were not optimally utilized, causing longer history collection times. In this version, node collection timeout and granularity is calculated dynamically, which causes faster completion of history collection.

Monitor AMC history collection status

The amc-migration tool is renamed to amc-mgmt tool, and has been enhanced to monitor the history collection status. It includes options to view completion status for each node or class. For more information, see Merge collection configuration and view history collection status using AMC Management tool.

New Flex reports

The following reports are available from this release:

• The Oracle Flex reports give information about the Oracle database instances and the underlying infrastructure operating in your environment. For more information, see Oracle Executive Summary Flex reports. 
• The MS SQL Flex reports give information about the MS SQL database instances and the underlying infrastructure operating in your environment. For more information, see MS SQL Executive Summary Flex reports. 
• The WebLogic Flex reports give information about the WebLogic application servers and underlying infrastructure operating in your environment. For more information, see WebLogic Executive Summary Flex reports. 
• The cross domain reports with application data for Operations Bridge Integration Hub for AppDynamics and underlying infrastructure operating in your environment monitored by Operations Bridge. For more information, see AppDynamics Flex reports.
• The Operations Bridge and NOM Infrastructure Executive Summary Flex report which provides an overview of the availability, performance, and inventory details of infrastructure, applications, and network nodes monitored by Operations Bridge and Network Operations Management (NOM). For more information, see configure the application for the Operations Bridge and NOM Infrastructure report, Infrastructure Executive Summary Flex report, and Synthetic Transaction Flex reports. 
• The out of the box Agentless Monitoring Flex report which gives information about the performance of nodes monitored by SiteScope generic monitors. For more information, see Agentless Monitoring Flex reports.

Localized reports

The out of the box Events and Service Health Flex reports are available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and Korean languages. For more information, see Use OPTIC Reporting.

Extension of Schema (customer requests) 

New columns on opr_event dataset (originating_obm_server_name, originating_obm_ip_address)

Additional Aggregation (sum) (metric_value_integer_sum,metric_value_double_sum) in Agentless_generic_1h,_1d

Install and Upgrade

This release introduces the following features in install and upgrade:

Automatic synchronization of parameters between values.yaml and AppHub

The parameter values in values.yaml and AppHub are now synchronized automatically. This ensures consistency in the parameters. It also enables you to reconfigure and upgrade your application using either CLI or AppHub irrespective of the deployment choice you made during installation. For more information, see Onboard a CLI deployment to AppHub.

Migrate a low footprint deployment to a regular deployment

You can now migrate a low footprint deployment to a regular deployment. For more information and steps to migrate, see Migrate low footprint deployment to a regular deployment.

Note: Many of these new capabilities are also available in Operations Bridge SaaS deployments. Please see Release notes - Operations Bridge - SaaS (microfocus.com) for details.

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 Operations Bridge Video Library 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 SaaS, Operations Bridge Manager, SiteScope, Operations Agent, Operations Bridge Analytics, Application Performance Management (APM) and Operations Orchestration (OO).

Events

• On-demand webinar: OpenTelemetry Changes Everything
• On-demand webinar: Operations Bridge 24.2 Release Readiness Webinar

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