February 2012 release

Release notes for the February, 2012 LogicMonitor release, which will be applied to servers over the next week or so. (Account administrators will be notified about the applicable update time.)

New Features

• Alerts can now be routed to phones via Voice alert text to speech functionality.  Define a phone number of a LogicMonitor user, and add the contact destination user.voice to a stage in an alert chain, and the alert will be escalated to the phone number.  Voice calls are by default limited to 3 calls per hour per number. The first five calls a month are free. Further calls are charged – $25 for up to 25 calls.
• Alerts can also be delivered by WebHooks – POST (or GET request) to your servers when alerts occur.
• Support for Remote Sessions to monitored hosts – this feature allows you to securely forward SSH or RDP sessions from any web browser to monitored hosts. Communications are encrypted over SSL from the browser to the agent, then use the native protocol (SSH or RDP) to the end host. This ability is subject to access controls, and by default is disabled for all users. (Known issue: on Windows, username/password failures or RDP being disabled on the end machine both result in an Exception message.)

Improvements

• Map improvements: the host DisplayName is shown on the map with the location pin; improved color coding of location icons; map is displayed in the same window (to avoid pop-up blockers);
• Addition of a Map Widget for dashboards, showing the state of host groups by location
• Security:
  • Ability to limit access to a LogicMonitor portal via IP address whitelisting
  • An account is locked for 5 minutes after 5 failed login attempts.
• NOC widgets are now sortable (by status or group name)
• The system will prompt you to enter the reasons for a datasource update, so the history of changes are easily visible.
• Each dashboard widget now supports individually configurable refresh timers.
• The Alerts tab can now be set to automatically refresh, with a user defined refresh interval
• Ability to download SmartGraphs as PNG images
• A new schedule option for Active Discovery: run AD only when the host is initially added, or when Forced Active Discovery is selected. (Useful to prevent checking for port based datasources every day.)
• name-value pairs can now be separated by by colons, not just equal signs.
• Network Scan policies are now automatically saved when executed.
• Script datasources can now run powershell scripts natively
• External Website Monitoring/Services:
  • Services alerts now identify which URL failed when following a chain of redirects
  • The ability to schedule downtime from a specific collection point for Services
  • Services search field – now supports searching for a partial url
  • Support for HEAD and POST HTTP methods, as well as GET
  • Support for custom headers
  • ability to invert a match
• It is now possible to use host properties as virtual datapoints in a graph. (.e.g defining a property COMMITLEVEL and graphing a virtual datapoint ##COMMITLEVEL##) (This does not yet work on custom graphs.)
• improved xen collector performance
• The Link to URL field for a host now supports ssh urls such as ssh://192.168.1.1  (although a URL handler needs to be present in the OS or browser)
• Batch jobs now support scheduled down time.
• extended the supported length of comments for Scheduled Downtime
• Change to the format of alert Acknowledgement subject lines, to make them easier to distinguish from alerts. Acknowledgement messages are now of the form “Ack of alert by User“, rather than “Alert alert has been acknowledged by User“
• It is now possible to manually specify the color for aggregated datapoints on flexible custom dashboard graphs
• It is now possible to import new SNMP OIDs from the LogicMonitor core repository.
• The ability to match Windows informational level events in eventsources, providing the event ID is specified.
• inclusion of a DNS library in the agent for use in DNS server checks and more
• Agents now use persistent connections to reduce the number of connections from agent to our servers – this will reduce the load on proxies where the agent communicates through proxies.
• snmp can now be collected on ports other than the standard port 161, by setting the property snmp.port globally, per group or per host.
• The JDBC collector for database queries now supports a raw datapoint ‘status’, which will make it easier to distinguish between connectivity failures and authentication failures.
• An alert cleared message is now sent after an agent that was down has recovered.
• Logwatcher improvements:
  • LogWatcher alerts now include the filer name and line number in the alert message
  • the ability to support multiple patterns in one match tag
  • You can now define exclude patterns to prevent lines that would otherwise match from triggering events.

UI Improvements

• Stages are now labelled with their stage number in the escalation chain editing form, and the editing buttons are now consistent with the rest of the UI.
• alert throttling is now referred to as alert rate limiting
• The datasource page will now prompt to save if there are unsaved changes when the user attempts to leave the page
• Default Min to 0 on overview graph creation
• “Show raw data” now shows the  values for calculated datapoints as well as direct datapoints.
• There is now a warning displayed in the alert if agent down alert not set
• Scheduled Downtime currently in effect is highlighted in red in the Manage Scheduled Downtime form
• Improved way to monitored Windows processes and services – right click …More..Add Monitored Resource
• Enforcing the inability to have groups names contain the reserved character ‘/’

Bugs corrected

• Clear alerts were incorrectly being sent if the alert cleared during SDT
• Host-down alerts were incorrectly sent when the issue was in fact agent connectivity issues, in some cases. The host down detection now requires positive messages from the agent.
• Various UI inconsistencies between the right click options and More button have been fixed
• Various spelling and other minor issues corrected.
• The Alert Filter on the alert tab was cleared in the UI after collapse/expand, but was still in effect.
• Hosts in SDT were not shown in blue on the google map display.
• Comments on creating SDTs for BatchJobs were not saved
• SDTs that crossed midnight were not always respected
• Acknowledged alerts were being unacknowledged in some edge cases
• Form based datapoint definition prevented the entry of time based thresholds.
• Dynamic Groups based on system.categories inherited by OID matching were not working
• It was not possible to delete manually added instances
• Corrected an issue preventing group names having spaces from being edited/created.
• Updated alert notes were not saved
• No longer require a double slash ( ) to separate domainuser when specifying agent credentials for a proxy
• Added support for ##GROUP## as well as ##GROUPS## in alert templates
• corrected the inability to erase a property from being inherited by setting the property to blank at a higher level.
• Corrected an issue whereby the enforcing of strong SSL ciphers in agent/server communications prevented agent communicating via proxies.
• Services:
  • an error prevented adding web services monitoring graphs to dashboards.
  • Alerts were not treating the services folder as a group for alert routing
  • Alert cleared messages were sent even if disabled
  • Incorrectly followed redirects when “Follow Redirection” was set to No

Known Issues:

• Modifying a windows event source filter does not correctly cause the agent to apply the new filter until another configuration change is made
• There may be an issue with time based escalation chains with a single stage and alerts being routed to it outside of the defined time – under investigation