Release notes, September 2012

This update will start being rolled out to production customers this week.
With our increasing numbers of European customers, we have expanded our live support hours: 9 am London time all the way through to 5:30 pm Pacific, Monday – Friday.  We’ve also changed the chat icon, so that if no engineers are online, it allows you to leave a message, which opens a support ticket.

Improvements

• Dashboards
  • Added the ability to clone a dashboard.
  • It is now possible to download the image from graph widgets, directly from the dashboard, by means of the download icon on the widget.
  • “Full screen” mode for dashboards (click the green icon with 4 arrows to the right of the dashboard tool bar)
  • Flexible custom graphs can now have hosts selected by group membership, as well as host pattern matching
  • The event widget (which reported collector level events) has been removed – the functionality is available under the Settings..Collector mangement ..Check Collector Events screen.
• Reports
  • Prettier Reports! Graphs in reports now use the same graphing look as graphs in the web interface.
  • New report type, Alert Threshold Report, allows you to easily see all the thresholds in effect for a set of hosts, and if they have any thresholds overridden.
  • Ability to show 95th percentile lines in metric trend reports.
• Alerts and Alerting
  • Alert thresholds for a host can now be edited directly from the Alert panel for that host – click the pencil next to the alerts and you can see the global and group level thresholds, and edit the threshold for this instance.
  • Alert Cleared messages are now under template control. (Alerts are under Settings..Alert Settings..Other Alert Settings..Default Alert Templates.)
  • Scheduled Downtime can now be set on the Instance Group level (currently only for manually managed instance groups.)
  • Improvements in webhooks (many more tokens, consolidated UI, etc.)
  • Improvements in native SMS delivery
  • Explicit throttling for voice calls has been removed, and uses the escalation chain throttle controls.
  • Reverted to behavior that alert clears are sent to all contacts that received the alert, instead of just the acknowledger.
• Collector
  • The Collector configuration utility on Windows can now automatically detect proxy settings configured for Internet Explorer.
  • To avoid any issues with automatically updated versions of Java, collectors now install their own JRE.
  • Reduce collector’s use of abortive TCP connection release.
• Passwords now require minimum of 5 characters
• The Logwatcher has been retired as a standalone system, and it’s functionality is now merged into the collector
• Customizable New User message
• Updated the  ESX Host- datasource for all customers, so that the ESXi hosts CPU is changed from host.cpu.usage.average to host.cpu.utilization.average. The newer counter is more accurate with hyperthreading, so you may notice a slightly higher reported CPU usage.
• Sitemonitor (service checking) now supports Ping checks from the external locations, instead of just HTTP and HTTPS.
• External website checking now reports and graphs fullpage load if configured to do so.

Bugs Corrected

• There was an incorrect threshold set on the ESX Hardware Health- datasource for some customers. This has been corrected.
• Corrected an issue where group threshold were not applied in certain edge cases
• A Datasource with an invalid regular expression defined for a datapoint would prevent all other datapoints from collecting. This is corrected so that other datapoints are reported correctly, and an error logged in the collector logs.
• Corrected an issue where a datasource change that should have been non-impacting led to an inconsistency between server components internally, blocking data from being stored (but not affecting alerting.)
• Excludes Cisco IOS XE devices from incorrectly matching the IsLinux() function
• Corrected a bug where mysql- datasource did not timeout if the connection was accepted by the server, but not responded to
• Corrected an issue with JDBC active discovery where a combination of a long URL and a long SQL query would exceed the internal field length, and prevent the datasource being updated.
• Added scroll bars when needed to the “Show Hosts with Scheduled Downtime” option of the top node of the host tree, to accommodate displaying many hosts in SDT on smaller monitors.
• Corrected an AJAX caching issue that caused adding a new Service to prevent turning off monitoring or alerting for all services until a page refresh
• Corrected an issue preventing users with “Ack only” role for certain hosts from seeing Event alerts on those hosts.
• Corrected an issue that prevented “Remote Session” functionality via SSH from working with Cisco devices
• Users with Manage Hosts role could add and delete hosts, but not change thresholds on the hosts. This is corrected.
• Improvements in Perfmon data collection
• Corrected an issue whereby instances could be removed by JMX active discovery if the JMX service was not responding. It was corrected to only remove instances where the service responds, but reports the instance no longer present.
• Corrected an issue with recent versions of Chrome not showing PDF or CSV reports
• Datasources in a display group were not showing the form that allowed SDT to be defined on a datasource at a group level.
• When viewing script datasources in IE and chrome, sometimes they were intermittently unviewable in the datasource pane
• Corrected duplicate displaying of datasource and eventsource display groups.
• Corrected an issue with expanded dashboard graphs showing at the top of the page, even if the graph being viewed was located below the fold.
• Users were not able to rearrange the layout of widgets even on their private dashboards, unless they had administrative roles. Corrected.
• Corrected an issue involving time based escalation sub-chains being re-ordered on saving of time-based chain
• Corrected in issue in CSV report formatting, where incorrect escaping of characters such as commas resulted in incorrect tabulation.
• Corrected an issue where dashboard graphs downloaded via FireFox had their filename truncated to just the host
• The “Download Report” from the alerts tab was not being subjected to role based access control.
• Corrected an error with Oracle database monitoring when the collector was returning no data when authentication failed (as opposed to return “No Data”)
• The Tutorial dashboard videos were not playable in Chrome
• Corrected an issue where Cluster Alerts that were set to “Suppress Individual Alerts” were not suppressing individual alerts in sub-groups
• Corrected the time zone settings for UTC+02:00 Helsinki, Athens, Bucharest, Cairo, Pretoria, Sofia
• Alerts to SMS email addresses were no longer using SMS template if custom template set for datapoint
• SMS Alerts Short Template were incorrectly including verbage “Please click URL …”