Release Notes for GroundWork Monitor
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GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 8.1.0
GroundWork Monitor Enterprise | Version 8.1.0 | Release
These release notes describe the new features and improvements, known issues and limitations for GroundWork Monitor 8.1.0. They also provide announcements as of version 8.1.0, including currently supported and end-of-life versions of GroundWork Monitor.
This is an important release, one that has been anticipated for some time. With this release, all the major functionality of GroundWork Monitor 7.x versions that we plan to bring forward to 8.x is present. Parent child servers are now easily installed and supported without the need for GroundWork Professional Services assistance (though of course you are welcome to ask us for help), as is the Elastic connector (similar to LogBridge). We are also introducing the Transit Connection Generator (TCG), which fulfills several functions in GroundWork Monitor including feeding data from Nagios™ servers to the GroundWork Foundation data normalization layer. We are extending TCG for many more uses and plan to make it a major tool in the monitoring toolkit for the whole community to share.
New features
GroundWork Monitor 8.1.0 offers new key features and improvements compared to the previous 8.0.1 release.
Parent Child Server Installations
GroundWork Monitor 8.1.0 now allows for three additional installation modes in addition to the default "standalone" mode supported by versions 8.0.0 and 8.0.1. The new modes are: Parent, Parent-Managed-Child and Child-Managed-Child. These new modes allow you to configure GroundWork in distributed server configurations. The Child-Managed-Child mode is an entirely new way of delegating administration to remote teams and locations.
Elastic Connector
The GroundWork Elastic connector updates the LogBridge functionality of GroundWork 7.x with an all-new, easy to use unified monitoring connection to Elastic Stack clusters. It's ready to use out-of-the-box, and works with existing Elasticsearch and Kibana installations you may already have in your infrastructure. You can now use GroundWork to track, notify and report on services based on Elastic Lucene queries.
Dual Names, Dual Certs
GroundWork 8.1.0 allows you to address GroundWork servers with a primary and alternate DNS name, and associated certificates. This is useful when configuring front-end connections for user access with CA certs, and back-end connections with self-signed certs for management networks, as well as other purposes.
Fixed issues
This section describes the fixes we have included in this release. As 8.1.0 is primarily a feature release, this number is relatively low.
| Key | Summary | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| GROUNDWORK-271 | NeDi connector reports unreachable for hosts and services | This was due to moni.pl not running. |
| GROUNDWORK-374 | Hostgroups report state but there is no state for hostgroups | Fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-381 | Acknowledge service on dashboard is not working | The SLA dashboard has this feature, and it works in all cases now. |
| GROUNDWORK-576 | Occasional error on update with active network connection | Fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-583 | SLA processing doesn't respect day borders if duration is more than one day | Rare case, but SLA reports that were reprocessed over a day border could give you inconsistent output. Fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-588 | Host status is wrong (hosts can't be critical or warning) | Fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-649 | Add host top problems to Top Problems for groups that contain hosts | It just seemed like the right thing to do. |
| GROUNDWORK-665 | Service list not working consistently | In the SLA dashboard, there's a handy widget called Service List. It's working fine now for all service types. |
| GROUNDWORK-696 | Hosts Pending in Status view OK in Nagios | There's a little bit of latency still, but in general you won't see Pending state last long unless Nagios has it too. |
| GROUNDWORK-702 | BSM notification message link is for old Status viewer | Fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-723 | Status view graph alignment needs tune-up | Fixed alignment. |
| GROUNDWORK-726 | NeDi cleanup of landing page | There were some html errors on this page that are now fixed. Don't blame NeDi, this was our doing. |
| GROUNDWORK-728 | GroundWork Monitor: License, Error: Device allocation hard limit expired | Fixed inconsistent messaging around the license limit being exceeded. |
| GROUNDWORK-742 | Invalid ini dir running: check_wmi_plus.pl | This plugin needs a little setup. See the docs, but it's easier now. |
| GROUNDWORK-778 | Downtimes not removed when hosts deleted | Fixed. This actually affects version 7.2.1 as well, so we fixed it for both. |
| GROUNDWORK-784 | Odd host added to Status with Google connector, no services | The host was named for the GCP availability zone and was added as a test of functionality for QA. We took it out so it wouldn't affect your license count. |
| GROUNDWORK-789 | Orphaned downtimes are sometimes not deleted | Fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-817 | Ack comments and Downtime comments doubled on Nagios hosts/services | Fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-833 | Copyright is 2019 in footer | It's 2020, so we updated the footer. |
| GROUNDWORK-835 | Rework the Service Group dialog | It's way easier to select servicegroup members now. Faster also. |
| GROUNDWORK-836 | License reports Hard Limit on Soft Limit expiration | Fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-837 | Occasional failures to capture valid performance data | This was a quoting problem, and is fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-840 | GroundWork does not start on host reboot | Fixed with a systemd unit file (you have to implement it). |
| GROUNDWORK-842 | Math Issue #1 - /api/perfdata calls with identical timeframes and intervals return different numbers of results | Adjusted algorithm to pull data from InfluxDB correctly. |
| GROUNDWORK-843 | Insight says and calculates correlation: yesterday when time period is 48 hours | Adjusted Insight dashboard to only show stats that make sense for the selected time range. |
| GROUNDWORK-844 | Insight math use Raw Stats over Average Stats | Improved the accuracy of the correlation and other stats in the Insight dashboard. |
| GROUNDWORK-845 | Insight correlation Raw Data calculation | Improved the accuracy of the correlation and other stats in the Insight dashboard. |
| GROUNDWORK-860 | Elastic Network ELB metrics can't be saved | In the AWS connector for Network ELB metrics, adding your own new metrics didn't work. Fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-885 | Monarch container needs vi installed | Sometimes you need to edit a file in the monarch container. We added vi for you. |
| GROUNDWORK-887 | Host "foundation" appears in Status Summary | It's actually configurable now, and you can get rid of it or rename it, but it monitors the state of all your connectors. See docs. |
| GROUNDWORK-899 | Fix usage message in monarch_assign_service_to_host | Fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-928 | JavaScript error for hovering over menu | Fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-956 | Connectors: metrics list is not updated after metric removal | Actually, the removal did happen but wasn't visible until you refreshed the page. Now it is visible immediately. |
| GROUNDWORK-965 | Events: incorrect icon for OK status | Event viewer got an update and the icon was corrected. |
| GROUNDWORK-995 | "Data too large" Elastic/Kibana exceptions | Fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-999 | Dashboards > Status: Actions button does not expand | Intermittent problem, fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-1012 | Acknowledge issues: Notify contacts "list" link does not work | Actually, there's still a known issue here, but the link is removed at least. |
| GROUNDWORK-1021 | Nagios acknowledged property not set | Sometimes acknowledging a host or service wouldn't propagate to Nagios properly. This is fixed now. |
| GROUNDWORK-1028 | Support link goes to knowledge base not main support page | Fixed. |
| GROUNDWORK-1037 | Curator failed with exit 1 on 8.0.1 | Fixed a misconfiguration of curator that caused it to crash. |
Known issues
This section lists any known issues and limitations with work-arounds.
| Category | Title | Description | Work-around |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monitoring Plugins | Some plugins may not work | The plugins included with GroundWork Monitor 8.1.0 are incompletely tested. | If you encounter a plugin you need to work that doesn't, please file a support case. We will get you a working version as soon as possible, and include it in later releases. |
| Acknowledgements | No host down acknowledgement button | The Status Summary for a host does not include a button to acknowledge when a host is down. | You can acknowledge this condition using the check boxes on the host listings and choosing "ack selected". |
| LDAP | Cannot delete user created by LDAP sync | If you sync LDAP to GroundWork, the users who log in are imported. There's not much point in deleting them unless you disconnect the LDAP server, but even if you do so, the delete function isn't working. | There isn't a work-around, but then again there's no harm in leaving these user accounts alone. They will fail login once the LDAP server is inactive. |
| Business Service Monitoring | Default bsm-service-01 configured but empty | The service bsm-service-01 on host bsm-host is included as an example of Business Service Monitoring. It is in the unknown state as the member list is empty. | You can remove this (or add members) by going to the Configuration > BSM and SLAs > BSM > Manage Groups, and clicking the delete icon next to the group. |
| Reports | Some custom reports have errors | Some of the custom reports for availability and events don't get created correctly. | This issue will be fixed in a future release. |
| LDAP | If you change the master cypher key, LDAP may fail to connect | There is an intermittent race condition that affects the LDAP connection when you update the master cypher. You won't be able to use LDAP to connect if this occurs. | You can resolve this situation by restarting the groundwork container: cd gw8 docker-compose kill groundwork docker-compose up -d groundwork |
| Acknowledgements | Notify Contacts check box does not work | There is a Notify Contacts checkbox on the Acknowledgment modal dialog that does not work | Do not use this checkbox, It will be removed and replaced in a future version. |
| Security | Changing Master password does not work | It's possible to change the master password (and several other tokens) via the Administration-Security page. | Do not change the master password. Doing so will not work, and may interrupt the transmission of monitoring data. This will be fixed in a future release. The issue can be corrected by removing lines containing webservices.acct.lastupdate.timestamp from /usr/local/groundwork/config/ws_client.properties in the Nagios container. |
Announcements
Supported Versions
Current supported versions of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise include the latest versions 8.1.0, 8.0.1, 8.0.0, and version 7.2.1. Support for version 7.2.1 will expire December 31, 2021.
For supported architectures and browser compatibility see System Requirements.
Copyright 2004-2020 GroundWork Open Source, Inc. ("GroundWork"). All rights reserved. Use is subject to GroundWork commercial license terms. GroundWork Monitor products are released under the terms of the various public and commercial licenses. For information on licensing and open source elements please see Licenses used in GroundWork. GroundWork, GroundWork Open Source, GroundWork Monitor Professional, GroundWork Monitor Open Source, GroundWork Community Edition, GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, GroundWork Foundation, GroundWork Status Viewer, Monarch, and GroundWork Guava are trademarks of GroundWork Open Source, Inc. Other trademarks, logos and service marks (each, a "Mark") used in GroundWork’s products, including Nagios, which is a registered trademark of Ethan Galstad, are the property of other third parties. These Marks may not be used without the prior written consent of GroundWork Open Source or the third party that owns the respective Mark.