EA Collector – 22.180

EA Collector 22.180 will be released on November 3, 2016, and includes the following:

New Features:

• This Collector version includes support for Script Internal Service Checks.  This feature requires v82 – read more in our v82 release notes.
• We’ve added an option to the Collector Installation process that enables you to configure Collector size. Different sizes correspond to different JVM max memory sizes, and make it easier to ensure that your Collector is configured to handle its intended monitoring load.  This feature requires v82  – read more in our v82 release notes.

Improvements:

• Webpage data collection wasn’t working for sites with certificates using SHA256withDSA as the signature algorithm.  This was due to a known issue with JDK 8.  We’ve upgraded the Collector to JDK 8u102, which includes a fix for the issue.
• We increased the Collector’s SNMP operation timeout for discovery.  The change was made to accommodate devices that require more time to respond to a walk request (e.g. those with lots of objects and a slow management processor).
• ESX data collection wasn’t working for servers where OpenSSL was upgraded to 1.0.1t (which is included in this ESX security patch: https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2146720).  This was due to a cipher suite used by JDK 8 and disabled in OpenSSL 1.0.1t.  We’ve corrected the issue by adding an option to disable the relevant cipher suites on the Collector, only for the ESX collection mechanism.  To enable this option, set the value of.

• We’ve removed the Metaspace memory limit and improved how the ##WILDVALUE## syntax is handled in Groovy scripts, decreasing the amount of memory needed.
• In certain cases, previous EA Collectors displayed an increase in HTTP response times and different status codes.  This was because HttpClients & cookies were shared across asynchronous HTTP collection tasks.  Cookies will now be stored per HTTP task, which resolves the issue.
• In cases where SNMP based discovery times out (e.g. due to incorrect community string, wrong snmp port or a slow snmp agent), we will now retry discovery.

Bugs Fixed:

• WMI & Perfmon data collection wasn’t working correctly for some SQL Server counters.
• The Auto Properties subsystem wasn’t correctly detecting the SNMP version for devices that only support SNMP v1.
• External alerting wasn’t working correctly with external Powershell scripts.
• The Groovy Expect API included in the Collector previously supported two authentication methods that required user input: gssapi-with-mic and keyboard-interactive.  While uncommon, these authentication methods caused certain datasources to time out if the device being collected against supported one or both methods.  We’ve defaulted these authentication issues to being disabled on the Collector to correct the issue.
• Syslog event alerts weren’t displaying if the host header associated with the Syslog message didn’t match the device’s system.hostname.  We now match/filter Syslog messages based on hostname and IP to avoid this issue.