Required Collector MGD 22.004

We’re announcing GD Collector 22.004 as the new minimum Collector version.  Collector 22.004 includes a number of new features and improvements that have been made since our last required version, GD 19.000.  We’re confident that version 22.004 is stable, and are now asking that you upgrade all of your Collectors to version 22.004 or higher by October 31st (EAs 22.050, 22.084, 22.110, 22.142 are also acceptable).  If you fail to upgrade before October 31st, we will upgrade your Collectors for you.  

If you’re upgrading directly from GD 19, here’s a summary of the changes you can expect:

New collection methods

• A new BatchScript collection method is available for Datasources.  Our existing Datasource Script collection method polls data per discovered instance.  The new BatchScript collection method allows your collector to poll data for multiple instances at once, which is useful for script datasources that are collecting data across a large number of instances.  
• Eventsource collection can now happen via script, eliminating the need for IPMI collection methods.  
• Windows collectors now support embedded PowerShell scripting in datasources. The embedded PowerShell feature behaves just like embedded groovy scripting, in that PowerShell can be used both in Active Discovery and datapoint collection scripts. In the collector debug window there’s now a !posh command for testing PowerShell scripts that’s analogous to the existing !groovy command. Existing datasources using external PowerShell scripts (using the upload functionality) will continue to behave as always.

Improvements to existing collection methods 

SNMP:

• SNMP v3 data collection now supports the contextName and contextEngineId fields, which are used to distinguish multiple SNMP applications within the same SNMP engine. 
• Occasional gaps in data were observed for SNMPv3 data collection tasks relying on SNMP sessions that were shared across devices. The Collector now creates a new SNMP session for every SNMPv3 device.
• Eventsources configured to monitor SNMP v3 Traps weren’t working correctly.  This has been fixed. 
• Optimized SNMP to support 1000 devices.
• Corrected async SNMP collection timeouts.
• Our AutoProperties subsystem previously relied on detecting system OID, system info and system IP properties successfully with one version of SNMP before these device properties were set for the device.  That was causing issues in some cases where not all properties were detected.  In these cases, we now use the SNMP version that provided the most properties and set those properties for the device.

WMI & Perfmon:

• Improved how WMI reports no data, better distinguishing between the device not returning data and the collector having issues reporting data
• Any string returned via Perfmon would cause all datapoints to be reported as NaN.  We’ve fixed this. 

ESX:

• Updated the ESX discovery method to ignore IDs, allowing for discovery of all VMWare systems.
• ESX data collection sometimes resulted in HostStatus alerts not being triggered for dead devices. This has been corrected.

HTTP:

• Improved the webpage collector to avoid connections remaining open.

AWS:

• Restructured AWS S3 billing data collection to use CloudWatch data.

TCP:

• TCP data collection tasks no longer fail when ‘Connection reset’ is encountered.

PING:

• Optimized Ping to support 1000 devices.
• Ping packet send intervals have been increased from 250ms to 500ms to fix issues reporting invalid ping loss.

Event Collection:

• Added the ability to manually disable event collectors.  Previously this change could be made in the collector but did not take effect.
• Glob was not accurately supported for windows file names in Logfile EventSources.

NetApp

• Added additional Netapp configurations (netapp.connection.concurrency# and netapp.connection.threadPoolSize)  to manage the number of concurrent requests allowed to a netapp host.
• Optimized collection for large Netapp clusters to avoid collection tasks getting stuck in a waiting state.

Collector Installation & Monitoring

• The collector will now determine if a monitored device has a collector installed on it.  If so, the collector datasources will automatically apply.
• Three new collector datasources: Data Collecting Task, Event Collecting Task, and Collector Status.  These datasources provide metrics regarding how many instances a collector is monitoring, it’s current version, uptime, and task counts. 
• Added support for collector installations on newer versions of Ubuntu, RedHat, Centos and other operating systems using systemd.

Netscan

• Support for a new and improved version of Netscan.  
• Windows Netscan policies sometimes failed to discover multiple active devices. This was due to the way we interpreted multi-ping responses.  We’ve changed how we handle these responses to correct this issue.
• We’ve added more detail to the !nsplist and !nspdetail debug commands, including device DNS, system name, properties and more.

Netflow

• Improved Netflow to handle empty flows and delays in data refreshing.
• sFlow ports were previously being reported incorrectly in some cases.
• We’ve changed the way we calculate Netflow and sFlow in/out bytes to make Top Flow data more accurate in certain cases.
• Added the option to ignore NetFlow timestamps, commonly needed by SonicWall devices that do not report the current time in a common format.

Security Improvements

• We now utilize TLS 1.2 for reporting data back to LogicMonitor as well as for webpage and CIM collection tasks.
• The Collector’s JRE has been upgraded to JDK 8.  This addresses the security issue identified in CVE-2014-6593 and supports the GCM cipher suite.  Please see this page for the operating systems and configurations officially supported for JRE8.
• We’ve added support for a local collector configuration file, agent.conf.local. Any configurations added to this local file will override the generic agent.conf configuration file, and the agent.conf.local file won’t be editable via the LogicMonitor UI. This enables you to configure settings such as debug.disable=false and remotesession.disable=true, without worrying about these security settings being changed from the web UI.

JSW & External JAR Upgrades

• The Joda Time JAR has been upgraded to version 2.9.1
• The Jsch JAR has bee
  n upgraded to version 0.1.53 
• The Mongo-Java-Driver JAR has been updated to version 2.13.1
• The Java Service Wrapper under which the collector runs has been replaced with YAJSW.  This change addresses both a potential memory leak situation and allows for better collector troubleshooting. Additionally, the YAJSW wrapper provides more flexibility and support for future collector enhancements.