We are pleased to announce the availability of OpenText Operations Bridge CE 24.3, our AIOps platform. Our latest release provides the new monitoring content, the enhancements to our SaaS-based IT Operations Aviator and Application Observability, as well as the updated VMware vRealize Operations Manager (VROPS) integration and the new reports and Hyperscale Observability dashboards.

These changes apply to our Classic and Containerized products and Operations Bridge SaaS.

Summary of changes

Updated IT Operations Aviator

• Enhanced with more domain knowledge
• Support for seven additional languages

Application Observability

• The possibility to get the OpenTelemetry (OTel) data from JavaScript and other applications via the additional OTLP/HTTP receiver
• Enhanced metric exploration and thresholding
• Flex reports for Application Observability
• Trace view enhancements

Hyperscale Observability

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) monitoring:
  • Enhanced usability in the AWS troubleshooting dashboard using tags as filters
  • Cluster monitoring via Edge
  • AWS dashboards for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and AWS Lambda
• Kubernetes monitoring:
  • Support for the Monitoring Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

OPTIC Reporting

• New Flex reports BPM Application Monitoring Summary and BPM Status Over Time 
• Sample reports for creating Flex reports
• Enhanced documentation for creating Flex reports and the event model
• A white paper for reporting in the context of time shifts and business hours

The new Unified Content for Apache Cassandra

• Monitoring performance metrics and availability of Apache Cassandra clusters, data centers and nodes

Enhanced VROPS integration

• Enable/Disable Alert Collection Failure events
• Filter which events are integrated from VROPS
• HTTPS support for the Operations Agent communication

Details on the new features

Updated IT Operations Aviator

IT Operations Aviator with AI Operations (Aviator) is a conversational interface that integrates with your Operations Bridge Manager (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. For more information, see Get started with Aviator.

Now available as a SaaS offering, Aviator has been extended to support conversations in 8 different languages! In addition to the English language, you can now start conversations in French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Turkish.

Furthermore, on top of the domain knowledge already available in the first release (which covered PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Vertica, Operations Bridge and OBM), Aviator has been enriched with:

• Apache Cassandra
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• Microsoft Windows
• Microsoft SQL Server
• OpenSUSE Linux
• Rocky Linux

Figure 1. The Aviator conversation about Amazon EKS in German

For more information on 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, please contact your OpenText sales representative.

Application Observability

After our first Application Observability 24.2 release (for details, refer to OpenText Application Observability is now available - a technical overview!), we have further extended this solution by offering the following capabilities:

Get OTel data from JavaScript and other applications via the additional OTLP receiver

Previous versions of Application Observability only supported ingesting telemetry data through OTLP/gRPC. With this release, Application Observability supports ingesting OTel logs, traces and metrics over the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) as well (through HTTP/Protobuf on port 4318). This enhancement allows you to receive the data from JavaScript browser-based applications.

Data ingestion through OTLP/gRPC has also changed from the port 443 to the port 4317.

Enhanced metric exploration

• You can now view the metric data for multiple attribute values and change the graph to a multi-line display for more clarity. In addition, you can filter the metric data to nail it down to the exact metric that you want and save the metric view for later usage. For more information, see View and analyze metrics.

Figure 2. Enhanced metric exploration

Flex reports for Application Observability

• You can now create a predefined query on your metric view and use this query to create Flex reports in OPTIC One. For more information, see Create Flex reports.

Thresholding

• You can now add thresholds in metric views to see if there are parameters that require attention. You can also configure events that are sent when the thresholds are breached. For more information, see Configure thresholds and events.

Figure 3. Thresholding for metrics

Trace view enhancements

• Trace details can now be viewed in the form of a scatter plot widget instead of a bar graph. In the older format, it was difficult to select certain traces if they overlapped with each other. The current format helps filter successful traces from the traces with errors.
• The Trace Details page now includes a Span Type column that displays the types of operations being performed (such as a remote call, database query, etc.). This page also shows span event links for each span. You can click these links to view complete details of the event including its name, the time the event was created and other attributes. See Explore traces for more information.

Figure 4. OTel span events inside Trace Details

Hyperscale Observability

Enhanced usability with using tags as filters

You can now use tags in the Omnibar to filter what is displayed in the Watch List and the Event Browser (this enhancement is supported for Application & Service status and AWS troubleshooting dashboards). This allows you to focus on the CIs with a certain application tag, a region tag or any other tag that you use. When you select a tag in the Omnibar, the CIs that have that tag value are displayed in the Watch List and the Event Browser is filtered accordingly. Once you select a CI in the Watch List, its related topology is displayed in the top view.

Private cluster monitoring via Edge

You can now monitor private Amazon EKS and AKS clusters even if EKS/AKS interfaces cannot be directly accessed from the environment where your Kubernetes Monitoring is deployed. To achieve this, you can run the Kubernetes collection through the proxy deployed on Edge.

For more information, see Administer Hyperscale Observability for private clusters.

AWS dashboard enhancements

You can now monitor Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon RDS instances and AWS Lambda - Compute Services using the new EC2: Service Overview, RDS: Service Overview, and Lambda: Service Overview dashboards.

The Overview dashboards provide various details about your inventory – for example, how many instances, accounts, regions and functions are used. You can also view the availability of services and their performance and resource usage.

Figure 5. The Overview section of the EC2 dashboard

Figure 6. The Performance section of the RDS dashboard showing top 10 instances with high resource usage

For more information, see View EC2 Service Overview, View RDS Service Overview, and View Lambda Service Overview.

Kubernetes Monitoring

You can now monitor Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) 1.28.8-gke.1095000 and later.

For a complete list of supported Kubernetes distributions, see Administer Hyperscale Observability for Kubernetes.

OPTIC Reporting

New Flex reports

This release introduces the following new Flex reports:

• The BPM Application Monitoring Summary report provides a statistical overview of all applications, transactions and locations monitored by Business Process Monitor (BPM). For more information, see Synthetic Transaction Flex reports.

Figure 7. BPM Executive Summary report

• The BPM Status Over Time report gives you a summary of all synthetic transactions and locations in an application as well as their status over time. For more information, see Synthetic Transaction Flex reports. 

Figure 8. BPM Status over time report (the Performance tab)

Sample reports

OPTIC Reporting now provides samples that help you create customized reports. You can edit these sample reports or use parts of them as examples for your customizations utilizing various features, such as cross-launch, drilldowns, various widgets and groups of widgets. See the examples in Create a Flex report for detailed steps.

Note that to view Sample Flex Reports on OPTIC One, you need to download and deploy these sample reports. See Deploy sample reports for more information.

Enhanced event model documentation

The documentation now includes the examples of how to query the OPTIC Data Lake for event changes. See Customized Event views for details about available customized event views and the procedure on create reports using the custom view.

The white paper that describes reporting in context of time shifts and business hours

The new white paper OpsB OPTIC Data Lake Shift Based Reporting explains how to create reports that show availability, performance or any other data during certain shifts or specific business hours. The white paper comes with a script that helps you create corresponding views and facilitate the creation of your shift-based Flex reports.

Unified Content for Apache Cassandra

You can now monitor performance metrics and availability of Apache Cassandra clusters, data centers and nodes using our new Unified Content, which provides an OBM Management Pack and SiteScope monitors for Cassandra monitoring.

See the Operations Bridge Unified Content for Cassandra Release Notes for more information.

Enhanced VROPS integration

Enable/Disable Alert Collection Failure events

You can use the Enable/Disable Alert Collection Failure event feature to stop unnecessary alerts. For more information, see Alert Collection Failure event.

Filter which events are integrated from VROPS

VROPS Aria has several built-in alerts. These alerts are raised by VROPS if any failures occur and are then sent to OBM. However, these alerts may not contain all required data for further processing, for example for raising a ticket. In such scenarios, you can create customized alerts and stop receiving the default alerts coming from VROPS. For more information, see Event Filtering.

HTTPS support for the Operations Agent communication

With earlier versions of Operations Agent, the Operations Connector sent data to Operations Agent over the HTTP protocol. From Operations Agent 12.26 and later, the connector must send the data to Operations Agent over a secure HTTPS protocol.

Supported authentication types are No-Auth and Basic-Auth. For more information, see HTTPS support for Operations Agent communication.

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 24.3 Release Readiness Webinar

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